gamebunny wish interview

Mutable Realms' Wish is an intriguing animal. Billed as an "Ultra Massive" MMO and promising that "Unlike existing MMORPGs that confine players to a server with only a few hundred other players, Wish's highly-scalable server cluster infrastructure allows us to support tens of thousands of simultaneous players in a single shared world." - we are hopeful that the game will deliver on its promise.

Join us now for a decidedly un-wishy-washy chat with Lead Designer, Dave Rickey.

gamebunny:
You must be excited and perhaps a bit nervous about beginning beta. It’s only been underway for a week, but have beta testers surprised you with their in-game actions yet and have any changes been made due to user feedback?

Dave Rickey:
Quite a few things, on both counts. The players are already taking towns, which is happening much sooner than I expected with this number of people, and organizing to clear roads between the towns. We've gotten the expected feedback on game systems which has led to some changes, but we've also gotten ideas from them for things like letting them hook into our HTML-based Help system with their own game guides, maps, and such.

Tell us more about your “Unique” skill system. How is it different and better than other games?

Dave Rickey:
The two fundamental differences are the flat power curve (some someone 10% higher in their skills is only 10% stronger than you are, with no exponential multipliers involved), and the Action/Target pairs that underlie skill gain. You can only gain so much skill from performing the same kind of action against the same kind of creature, you reach a point where you need to go try something else, either use a different skill or fight a different creature. This encourages the players to explore, and look for new challenges. It also opens up making different creatures behave in different ways, in the traditional XP system players always naturally gravitate to the encounters that offer the best effort/reward ratio on XP, and anything that makes the monsters smarter makes them not worth the trouble. With our system, there's always an incentive to take on those more challenging encounters.

Can you elaborate on your NPCs (a pet peeve of mine is stationary, unrealistic NPCs.) Will they move around and interact well with players in meaningful ways?

Dave Rickey:
Most NPC's have a routine they pursue, in the case of shopkeepers this may be as simple as just wandering a bit inside their shops, checking their stock, looking out the door, etc. Others, like farmers, will move between their homes, their fields, and various shops. The intent is to make the towns feel more like living places rather than just false fronts.

We're hoping to give the monsters considerably more appearance of purpose and goals than has generally been the case in these games, as well, but that's a promise that has been made before so we'll just have to play it close to the vest until we have something to show.

You’ve stated that Wish can be considered “Quest-centric.” Can you tell us more about your Quest System and maybe grace us with an example ;)

Dave Rickey:
It's really hard to describe. The problem is, "Quest" has come to mean something totally different from what it did originally. A Quest was both a journey of self-discovery, and and attempt to make some change to the world in service to something larger than yourself. But in online games, it's become "run here, fetch that, talk to this NPC, jump through the right hoops and get your "shiny". There's no self-discovery (or discovery of any kind), and no change in the world except that another copy of the "Singing Sword of Uberness" having entered it. It's pure time filler at best, simple boredom more often than not, an alternative to grinding XP out of an_orc_colossus all night long.

We've made a decision not to hand-make any quests for Wish that don't either tell a story, or make a difference in the world. We feel it's better to have a few hundred *good* quests, than a few thousand that could just as easily have been generated by an automated system once you strip away the labels. We will probably have an automated "task" system, but we're not going to waste human talent on things that don't show any real sign of human creativity. This will hopefully let us create events and settings worthy of the word "Quest".

How do you feel about the new trend of “Instancing” private dungeons and play areas in upcoming games like Mythica and World of Warcraft? Will Wish have a similar feature?

Dave Rickey:
I think it has good points, but I'm always suspicious when an entire industry is stampeding towards an unproven "Magic Bullet". Instanced content has been used in Anarchy Online and to a limited degree in EverQuest and Asheron's Call 2, and it just hasn't had the overwhelming response from the players that would justify making it the sole source of gameplay. Ultimately, when you strip away the persistance of world and free social interaction, and substitute instanced content, what you're left with is Diablo plus a really pretty replacement for Battle.net. Now Diablo is hugely popular, but would it have been nearly as popular and long-lived at $13/month?

Now I realize that's a strong statement, but I'm a strong believer in the "game as world" approach to MMO design, and to me instanced content is a complete reversal of that. Rather than making the world more complete, making the systems more stabile, making the actions of players more meaningful, instanced content is just throwing in the towel and saying "We can't make anything you do matter, but we'll make it really *flashy* while it lasts". And at another level, they're an attempt by the developers to counter the unpredictable behavior of online game communities by reverting to what they know: scripted storylines in controlled environments. In other words, they think MMO's (and especially their revenue streams) are really nifty, but they don't want to deal with all of that icky, emergent, "community" stuff, where the question of "Who is really in charge here, me or the players?" gets so hard to answer.

My thanks go out to Dave and the folks at Mutable Realms and Themis Group.
For further info on WISH you can check the link below: