Remember that bit in the Warhammer 40,000 rulebook where that Space Marine went into a Space Marine village and was cornered by a commoner with a yellow exclamation mark above his head? The one who told him to go out to his garden and kill ten snotlings that were terrorising his space-crops? No you don’t, and neither does Mike Maza, creative director on Warhammer 40K MMO Dark Millennium Online.“We just couldn’t wrap our heads around a Space Marine killing ten wolves for their pelts. It’s just not 40K. We don’t want to give those kinds of quests to the players, we think it takes you out of the fiction. The objectives of our quests are far more epic than that.”
Two wheels good, tank tracks and ten guns: better
Warhammer 40K’s grim future of inter-species war is perhaps the only universe you could get away with a ‘kill except the number would be well into the thousands. But traditional online RPG models – all stilted combat and ritualistic toolbar presses – are anathema to a universe based on the sole unifying principle of smashing the faces off everything that ever existed. Dave Adams, founding father of developers Vigil, adds his perspective: “at first we said ‘let’s make a standard MMO. Guy goes in, dude’s standing there, patrol walks by. I tap, select him, and hit one.’ It was lousy.” It didn’t fit with the game played on tabletops across the world, it didn’t fit the team’s imagined experience, and most importantly, it didn’t fit with 40K’s endless, rapid-fire carnage.
Dave explains his vision of the universe, developed from 25 years of familiarity with Games Workshop products: “We’re designing a cinematic, action-oriented MMO, balanced in terms of player-on-player and player-versus-environment battles. There’s a lot of ranged combat, but also a healthy dose of melee. You’re not gonna have a bunch of static spawns, you’re not gonna have a bunch of random patrols.” Vigil are playing in a universe defined by a quarter of a decade of development, tightened but enhanced by reams of backstory. Were they to produce a retextured WoW, they’d be chainsworded to death by armies of angry fans – and rightly so.
Don't feed Dreadnoughts curry.
Fortunately, Vigil are aware of this. Dave has got serious complaints about the whole MMO genre. Whole genre, look away now: “You just pretty much hammer on the number keys. They’re the same mechanic over and over again.” Vigil previously worked on console-oriented action beat-’em-up Darksiders. It was heavy on the reactive combat, full of man-stabbing and bloody moments calculated to make people shout “yeah!” and want to play air guitar. Dave argues the team learned more from that experience than they have from their MMO peers. “There’s a lot more finesse in what you do in a console game. The moment-tomoment, the weight of the animations, the response, the effects. It’s really all about the pace.”
Strong words from a team without a finished MMO of their own. But it’s not like they’re novices paddling in the genre pool: Dave himself left online specialists NCsoft in 2005 to found Vigil. I asked him whether he thought any other online worlds got combat right: “It’s just not been a priority for them. A lot more attention is put into console games: if you sit down and you play an MMO, and you actually compared it to a triple-A console game, a lot of the stuff would never fly.”
He's either really close, or that's the world's dinkiest Titan.
I asked him why he thought that was. “A lot of developers see that as an opportunity to cut that corner because there’s so much to do on an MMO. They think people care about X, Y and Z. They don’t really care about the feeling of the combat.” But Vigil have to make the same world, the same economy, the same community as other online world- builders – how will their MMO break this apparent corner-cutting culture? “That disparity isn’t going to be tolerated for too long: eventually someone’s going to do it and everyone else is going to have to follow suit. We want to be those people, and that pushed us toward a more action- oriented formula.”
Dave began to describe what he meant by this, but not before sticking a final power-armoured boot into MMO contemporaries. “If you see an MMO 20 feet away you know it’s an MMO. There’s a million icons on the screen, the interface is the same. They’re so predictable. Our goal is when some guy’s walking past DMO they won’t instantly know it’s an MMO. That depends on a minimal interface: it’s not a full FPS but it looks more ‘actiony’.”
Actiony is not a word. Define ‘actiony’, Dave! Mike Maza stepped in to help: “We’ve done away with the action bar icon from the screen – we’ve kept it down to essential elements for ranged combat.” That’s not to suggest that it’s all shooting – half of Warhammer 40K is focused on getting within spitting distance of your enemy and then jabbing the pointiest thing your race knows about into their eye. But Mike says that’s simpler to handle than gunplay. “Melee combat is relatively easy, we have tons of examples of how it’s been done in the past.” It’s similarly easy to see how it’ll be approached in DMO – a middle ground between the kinetic feedback of singleplayer fighting and the arcane dance of MMO combat. How the team will deal with frantic battlefield crossfire is less obvious. Internal discussions are still ongoing about shooting specifics, and subject to rapid change.
continued @ http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/12/04/warhammer-40k-dark-millennium-online-a-grim-dark-future/
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