Question: Is allowing players to circumvent the grind after they have done the grind once a good idea?
Damion Schubert: It depends on the game but it certainly can be. In the case of Dark Age of Camelot for example, their secret sauce was their endgame, it was their RVR. People still talk about their RVR as some of the best PVP Combat that has ever been in a game and it was in their best interest to get people there if they wanted to be there. On the other hand, if what you are making is where you want players to experience the level up process, that might not be in your best interest. It's going to be based on the game. I do think that a lot of people are being protective of the idea of "Oh, we cant possibly do that. We would lose 50 or 500 hours of potential playtime from this player." Well I think in general it's better for players to play the game they want to play.
Update: Damion Schubert made the presentation slides for The Grind available via his website for those interested.
More highlights from the Q&A portion are available after the jump
Comment: Achievements in singleplayer games don't necessarily feel grindy but achievements in multiplayer games can feel grindy.
Damion Schubert: Possibly yes, I have actually found plenty of singleplayer game achievements that were incredibly stupidly grindy as well. Part of what you see a lot of these companies trying to do is they are actually trying to move the hardcore game play to the achievements in order to get the grindy, really hardcore stuff off of the main critical path. So everybody can hit max level and the hardcore why don't you try this stuff out here. Part of that is that there are a lot of players who won't log into these games unless they have something to do and the achievements offer a way for designers to create those things vaguely cheaply and make them very much with varying levels of difficulty and insanity to accomplish. So I think when you see that what you see is them to some degree trying to make content because otherwise, I know some people may disagree with me, but I know a whole bunch of players and I am the player type that's like "Oh, I don't have any quests or objectives to do." "Why am I here?" "Why am I not playing another game?"
Question: Can balance between reward for grind behavior and skilled behavior be achieved? How?
Damion Schubert: Yes. How do you achieve that? It's really hard. The fundamental problem is usually not balancing grind versus skill. That's actually fairly easy the problem is that usually those two things compound. So usually the people who are really good also play it a lot so they have both sets of rewards. So the guy who has good skill and has grind will crush just the grinders and will crush just the people who have skill. That's really the crux of the problem the designer has to solve. How do you keep that compounded player from becoming utterly ridiculous and making it frustrating for everybody else?
Question: What do you think about extending your friends circle in the grind? (In reference to Facebook)
Damion Schubert: I think that it is perceived as a grind by a lot of people because people feel vaguely squicky about their friends in order to draw them into the game experience. A lot of people feel squicky about, for instance, letting their boss know they are playing Frontierville especially if they should be working. And so I think there are a lot of interesting feelings that are going on. I think that designers for all of those games are still kinda navigating those waters. This is my pet theory: I personally see Social Games (Facebook games) in the same position where Everquest was twenty years ago. Where in Everquest you had to group to advance, period. And they have since dialed that back to where now the entire genre is open soloing. I think Facebook games two years ago, that's where they are, and I think Facebook Games have been backing away from that and or providing new ways for you to bypass that grind because again a lot of people are introverts, a lot of people don't necessarily want to share their gaming with other people, a lot of people want to play Facebook Games alone believe it or not.
Comment: Whether or not these cheap grindy things that you put in as a designer satisfy the hardcore. (In reference to "Find all the books" type quests)
Damion Schubert: I would say they satisfy a type of hardcore. The thing about most grindy things is that they aren't rewarding skill. Most of the time when you are putting in a grindy activity it's rewarding dedication, devotion, the idea that you want to max out something. So if you as a game designer want something that rewards skill, putting in an achievement to kill 5000 pirates or touch all of the computer terminals isn't going to do that. You would need achievements that are "kill this insanely tough boss with a hand tied behind you back, etc." That's not a grindy achievement that is a really hard achievement in most cases those are meant for skill. But I still think that allowing people to choose their devotion is generally a good thing because you want people to be devoted to your games whether or not they are single player games, facebook games, massively multiplayer ones.
Question: What's your view on the grind that players impose on each other? (In reference to Gearscore in WoW)
Damion Schubert: In World of Warcraft there are mods that look at someone else and give you an aggregate score of someone else based on how well geared they are. I think that is an interesting development and I am not entirely sure what to think of it yet because Gearscore arrived from a fairly critical need. Which is that it is really tough to run a dungeon with a tank who is under-geared. It is in fact a horrible and wretched experience, not just in WoW but in almost any game because you are running back to your corpse an awful lot. And the problem is that the player base took it and got really dogmatic about it. People will now disband a group immediately if you show up in anything less than the most latest hot-shit gear that is possibly available. Even though to run a random dungeon in WoW you only need reasonable gear to run it. So I think it is one of those things that has gone too far in that environment and I am not entirely sure how to correct it but I haven't given a lot of thought to be honest.
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Posted 10/13/2010 11:17:43 PM- View User Profile
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Posted 10/13/2010 11:12:06 PM- View User Profile
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Posted 10/8/2010 10:45:37 PMEither that or Damion Schubert has been hanging around 5-year-olds way too much these days.
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Posted 10/10/2010 5:14:09 AMhttp://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Squick
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Posted 10/9/2010 12:12:48 AM- View User Profile
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Posted 10/9/2010 8:51:48 PM1. To make one feel sick or disgusted. 2. To squick over a bizarre and distasteful situation.
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Posted 10/8/2010 3:19:04 PMAs far as gear score I hope they figure out a way to make players able to compete in both PvE and PvP without having the most badass gear. Its very annoying if you dont have high resilience for PvP or a high gear score in PvE you are basically gimped, they need to figure out a way to have skill be a part of this, how that is to be accomplished is a very good question.
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Posted 10/8/2010 2:45:23 PMI guess that I really would like to see the mentalities that were/are pervasive within WoW, be done away with. Let WoW's culture be WoW's culture and let SWTOR foster a new and different culture.
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Posted 10/13/2010 10:46:39 PM- View User Profile
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Posted 10/8/2010 2:19:56 PMI don't think they necessarily need to design specifically around it. But I do think the Dev's should pay close attention to it and the kinda culture it can create in the games community.
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Posted 10/8/2010 3:42:15 PMSome design level decisions are very much dependent on an attittude towards GS culture in games (either pro or con) and designing systems while intentionally ignorant of the GS factor will result in alot of headaches down the road (for both the DEVs and the players.)
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Posted 10/8/2010 7:02:27 PM- View User Profile
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Posted 10/10/2010 12:52:07 PMI hope that the Devs stay away from game mechanics that will foster that kind of mentality.
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Posted 10/8/2010 8:57:53 AMI liked what he said about gearscore, it immediatly made me think about SWTOR's companion system. Having the hottest gear in a dungeon won't matter too much, because you'll have that bigass companion dude to tank stuff for you and he's pretty good at it.
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Posted 10/8/2010 9:24:14 PM