Landmark & Keynote: First Response

Some quick notes about the Keynotes. I will be going into more later, but this is just my immediate reactions.

The first half of the landmark keynote was quite excellent, clearing up exactly what I've said before about what Landmark is going to be. 

PvP Combat is coming on the 27th with three basic weapons. Staff, Sword, and Bow.  The combat is very heavily based on what weapon you are using and what armor you are wearing. Your attacks are all on the weapon, and the armor will provide not only protection, but also various mobility or weapon assists. 

The PvP will be Claim based, activated by using various 'game' items like the Game Table, Respawn Points, Control Points, and such. We will also have moving platforms, teleporters, and flingers which are quite easy to place and manipulate to help create the battle field of your dreams. 

New stats coming with PvP are Mana/Energy to use abilities, Armor, and HP. Run out of Armor and you start to lose HP. Run out of HP and you die. Armor restores on its own if you don't take damage for a while.

A variety of mobs will be put into the world as well, but they will be coming after more feedback is in from the PvP testing of the combat. Many of them seem to be explosion based.

Like always, these are all very much important for EQ:N as well, despite EQ:N combat being class based.

What classes?

Wizard: Classic glass cannon, heavy ranged damage, stuns, and teleports. Upheaval really digs a hole under your enemies.

Warrior: Determine where, when, and how the fight will progress with this powerful, mobile, killer. Be careful with Whirlwind, it chews up the terrain.

(Battle) Cleric: Heavy Armor, Armor Restoring abilities, revives, all while fighting at the front lines. It looks like you also restore armor on any allies who are on the other side of the enemy from you.

Elementalist: Close combat caster, high risk, high reward. Flash Freeze will make the ground extremely brittle and easy to break.

Tempest: High mobility 'druid assassin' with a focus on single target damage, but enemies in a straight line are also easy pickings.

Obviously, that's not all, there will be over 40 classes at launch.

They also revealed the Dark Elf models and showed off a fair bit of combat in a Dark Elf city built from some of the contest entrants from the Dark Elf workshop. 

EQ:N (& Landmark) Lore Meets Mechanics

The EverQuest franchise has a long history of very deep and meaningful lore in its games. This is one of the major draws of EverQuest. One of the unique things about it that has helped them keep both games running side by side so long is that they are very similar, but are not the same. Dave Georgeson, Director of the EverQuest franchise, has explained that each game takes places in their own parallel universe, and at some points, they are connected.

I want to focus on EQN here, but I will point out that the very light lore they intend for Landmark apparently includes traveling through these dimensional boundaries which is why you will find Sci-Fi, Steampunk, and Fantasy all side by side in Landmark. And this is actually the first example of what I'm writing about. The story and the mechanics are intended to work together in EQN.

Several eBooks have been released since last year which contain almost all of the lore for EQN that we have been given so far. These books are rather short, but are packed full of wonderful information and despite players clamoring for 'more lore' few of those players have actually read the books. I highly encourage you to do so. Even if you aren't a player who is into the lore there are some interesting details to be found.

After hearing Dave hint a few times that the books are more than just lore I finally got it when one of the authors let slip that many of the mechanics are presented in the books. So I started wondering what mechanics they might be sharing with us. I'm only about half way through the books, and they just put out another one, but I'd like to share a few things I've noticed so far that we should expect to see in the game.

Meaningful Relationships
While they've talked about this before in Storybricks discussions there is a huge emphasis on meaningful relationships in the stories. I know literature is typically quite heavy on interpersonal interactions, but this takes it to a whole new level. Even the most twisted of backstabbers relies upon others and their current relationships with them. No one wantonly kills others for a small slight (even if they might think about it) because it would destroy their relationships, and relationships are an important resource that takes time and work to cultivate. They must be harvested at just the right time. The only time we see such wanton slaughter is from a character who's very purpose in existence is to bring death to the world, expect that to matter.

This goes right in line with what many have taken from the dev's statements. Who you kill will matter. There are consequences for everything you do, who sees it, and who learns of it. These won't just be simple 'faction' ratings either, these work on every level from kingdom, faction, down to groups and individuals.

Mentoring
Every story I've read so far has highly experienced and inexperienced characters working side by side, the experienced characters typically teach and guide the inexperienced ones in how to do their trade or skills more efficiently. Whether it be a thief teaching a mage about lockpicking, a pair of seasoned warriors teaching their young charge, a lore keeper passing his people's history to the next generation, or an arch mage becoming outclassed by his own apprentice, most of the stories start and end with these relationships being a major focal point. In literature this means 'you should pay attention to this element.'

Many games have tried Mentoring systems before, including EQII, but with the artificial number deflation/inflation it just feels wrong. In EQN the 5 Tiers are supposed to represent player skill rather than the levels of character power in most MMOs. Tier 1 content will not be a cakewalk for Tier 5 characters because they are not just 'weaker versions' of what the T5 takes on all the time. The T5 will have a relatively easy time simply because they have the skills and abilities to deal with it more efficiently. While playing with a T1, the T5 can teach the T1 player better skills on how to player the game so they can increase in Tier and gain access to more options for how to play. I expect that T5's will regularly take their T2 & T3 friends into T4 zones to teach them what it takes to earn their T4 rank.

If you see someone who is higher Tier then watch them, see what they are doing, ask them how they do what they do. That's how you learn. If you see someone who is lower Tier, then watch them, see what they are doing, give them advice, that's how you teach. Together, these moments form lasting friendships and bonds that hold a gaming community together.

I also expect that some players will be stuck at one rank or another for along time and some of them will whine and complain about not having a 'normal leveling system' or that 'it's too hard to get T5.' It comes down to learning the skill as a player for how to use your character, and for each class that will be very different. Some people don't want to do that, and for those who don't want to learn and prove they deserve higher, they should still be able to have fun staying at T3 or wherever they want to stop.

Personal Perspective
Reading The Fall of Bastion and Last Stand of the Tier'Dal shows very strikingly that the same events can be viewed very differently depending on which character you are seeing them through. Given the personal nature of the Emergent AI I expect this to be very true for players as well. We might be going through the same encounter or dungeon or whatever, but we will each have our very own experience with it. This could be anything from having to go different places in the same encounter, having different tasks and conversations, to things as small as each player 'sensing' different aspects of the dungeon. In Landmark we already see a little of this with the personalized settings for detecting claim boundaries and seeing other people's tools in use as well as with the Gem Seeker's Broach and personalized loot. We don't all see the world the same way.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles had a wonderful mechanic with this on the Game Cube. While each player was playing on one screen if they were using GameBoy Advance's as their controllers then they could look down at their own little screen for a personalized map and each player was set to detect something different so the players would have to work as a team to find everything. I believe EQN will take such concepts to a whole new level.

Magic
I don't just mean 'there is magic in the books, so expect magic in the game'. No, I mean the system of magic is being presented. In 'The Fall of Bastion' we see several details about the magic system the Arch Mage and his apprentice use. Aside from the various categories of magic specifically named (Illusion, Pain, Coercion, and Death) there is also quite a bit of 'drawing on local energy.' The Archmage and his apprentice apparently do not store most of their energy for magic within themselves, rather they pull in what is around, focusing it within their body before releasing it as a spell. Sustained magic is a constant drain on a 'spell flinger' both in terms of magic energy and physical stamina and limits their tactical options.

Unfortunately, something I have not yet seen that would be quite telling is the interplay of different elements of magic working together to do something quite different. This tells me that the developers probably do not see the mixing of elements as an important world mechanic. Whether this means will won't see such at all remains to be seen, but I won't be expecting it to play nearly the role I had hoped.

Races
EverQuest has always have quite a myriad of races available for players to choose from. So far we know that EQN will be starting upon the Combine's return, and according to the books the Combine consists of Elves, Dwarves, Ogres, Humans, Kerrans, and Gnomes. I would expect that all of these races will be available to play from the start. Whether or not any of the traditionally 'evil' races will be playable is not yet indicated in the text, though I believe Dark Elves (Teir'Dal) were officially announced as playable.

Good Vs Evil
In the past, EQ has used a stark contrast between Good and Evil but the have allowed us to play on either side. EQN we are already told does not hold to such a limited view. They said very clearly during the Dark Elf Workshop that there will be no such thing as an 'Evil Race.' This is also evidenced in the books. Elves are seen as All Evil by their Oger and Dwarven slaves but are proven otherwise. The Elvin Arch Mage Corelon is by no means Hard Core Evil like Ithiosor, but he is quite selfish in almost all respects and utilized Coercion magic with extreme skill. The Elvin Prince Keramor is unarguably a Good Guy figure but also holds his own views which many would consider to be more on the 'evil' side. Dragons are diverse in opinion and method even as they rally to destroy the mortal races. Rather than an arbitrary distinction, how our character is perceived in EQN will come down to personal action and inaction.

Storybricks AI In Depth

The Storybricks AI system, which is the backbone of EverQuest: Next's Emergent AI.

The following video from GameAIConf shows how Storybricks works through a few simple text based game interactions and is intended for an audience with a background in Game AI. We will be seeing the full scale application of this amazing technology in just a couple weeks at SOE Live when they show it off in the EverQuest: Next voxel world with 3d characters, and this presentation will be intended for players to understand. Go ahead and watch it if you are interested in the details behind the system, then come back for my discussion about what he didn't say here but has elsewhere and some implications of the system. Or just skip the video and I will try to give a summery of how it works.



First off, Storybricks is a Story Telling Engine which is designed to function on any type of game system. They call this being 'Game System Agnostic.' I don't just mean the classic PC vs Console debates either, I mean working for a text based game like shown in the video or a full graphics game, a single player horror or an MMO Shooter, Storybricks doesn't care what system you lay on top of it, it will happily function for any of them.

So what does it mean to be a Story Telling Engine? Basically, it takes the elements the designer has given it and constantly creates the story on the fly with the players choices. The designer need not plot out each new story and create separate content for every choice, they just design the elements and the players actions will cause new stories to unfold around them.

Parts of a Story Brick
In Storybricks these elements are called Universal Story Bricks and are utilized for everything. Every character is their own brick, every dramatic plot element is a brick (in the video he shows Winter from The Game of Thrones as a brick). If it makes sense to do so then organizations (such as the Houses of Capulet and Montague in Romeo & Juliet) can be their own bricks.

        Drives
Each brick can have its own Drives, these are the goals and desires that direct any action it has upon anything else. Those familiar with the EQN unvailing probably remember Dave Georgeson talking about making Orcs and 'releasing them into the world.' He mentioned some of their 'drives.' Orcs like roads that are traveled only a little bit. Orcs like to attack travelers. Orcs don't like Guards. Orcs don't like Cities. Orcs don't like getting beat up

        Changes
The next part of a Brick defines Changes that it can apply to other bricks. This can be anything from altering a mood, a change in faction reputation, granting traits, applying a buff effect, casting a spell, dealing damage. In our Orc example, there is a brick which constantly polls the game database for how often players travel the roads. If the travel is in the right range then the Road brick becomes attractive to the Orcs. A lone traveler's brick will tell the Orcs to attack.

        Parts
Parts seems a little miss named to me, but these define the limits to what the Changes are allowed to apply to. This ensures that each brick works together correctly with all the other bricks in the system.

        Exits
Actions which counter the drives of a brick trigger Exits, alternate paths that go to another brick, in some ways they are quite similar to Changes but is quite important for organizing when assembling a series of bricks to make the story. Exits are how you can foil the Orcs plans. Another brick would keep track of how often the Orcs are getting beat up so that the Orcs will leave the area if that gets too frequent. A nearby guard's brick will tell the Orc bricks to leave.

Interactive Stories
Ok, so that's what makes up the bricks of Storybricks, but how does this make an interactive story? Interactive Stories are about making meaningful choices. With so many bricks having conflicting Drives there should be plenty of room for dramatic tension and for opportunity costs. Each time a brick needs to make a choice several bricks with matching Changes and Parts are resented based on the brick's current Drives. Each time a choice is made it means that other choices are not made (which is the foundation of opportunity cost) and that inaction regarding other bricks can effect the choices they make.

Dynamic Ecosystem
Dave Georgeson, director of the EverQuest franchise, likes to refer to the interaction between bricks as a massive network of sumo wrestlers. They all push on each other and even a little difference in one push will have ripple effects through the whole system. Lets say a player doesn't like having the Orcs on that road but they aren't strong enough to kill the orcs themselves. So they go to a town and bribe a guard to travel the road. The Orcs don't like the guard on the road, so they leave. Now there is a 'power vacuum' in the area with the Orcs gone. Panthers come in to hunt the livestock in the area. The farmers are unable to produce food for the city because of the panthers. Time goes by without any of the players noticing (after all, it's a rarely traveled area) and the city doesn't ge their food. The city's food prices go up because of the shortage. NPCs in town are now desperate for aid from players. If the players don't help them they will be vulnerable to attack from other creatures and th town might be destroyed. This is only one of the many unintentional ramifications of the player bribing the guard to say nothing of what happens to the area were the Orcs ended up going.

Structured Stories
At times a designer will want to tell stories that are more structured. This largely comes down to designing the Drives, Changes, Parts (limits), and Exits of the main actor bricks so that they will eventually tell the right story as well as making sure the choice bricks made available are designed to fit those. It is also possible to select how dramatic the choices should be at any given time. This allows for having lulls for the player to recover from the stories climaxes, after all, you can't have the story running at full throttle the whole time or it will burn out the player and cheapen the climactic moments. Pacing is important for all stories, structured or dynamic.

Simplicity
In the video we saw a little bit of the code behind the bricks, and while I could tell you that it is really simple code we all know that most people would be completely unable to do anything if it requires typing things out in code. I know I hate coding myself. Which is why I am glad that in other videos from Storybricks we have seen that they are making a much easier way to make these things, so easy that you don't need to know anything about programming to make it work. Simply move the bricks around, connect them based on their shapes to make what you want and it will write the code to match. I still haven't seen the system for making those bricks and determining their shapes, but we are told that system will be easy to use as well. At the very least, in late April the stated that they had already programmed all of the possible 'basic wants, needs, desires, and emotions' which any characters in EQN would need. These basic drives should be made available to anyone using Storybricks and since it is Game System Agnostic it doesn't matter if you are making something totally different from EQN, these basic drives should still be fully applicable.

This system should revolutionize AI design, changing the face of the industry and the face of interactive storytelling in general. It will open the doors of crafting meaningful stories to a much larger pool of developers without costing a fortune to craft. I see AAA games and Indy games all taking advantage of this, and EQN is, as Dave said, "their show pony." It shouldn't be too much longer till we can start using this system in Landmark since Landmark is the toolset SOE is using to build EQN and they will need to start programming those NPCs soon.

I can't wait to see the presentation of Storybricks in EQN at SOE Live, only two weeks to go. In the future I will discuss in greater detail some of the implications of this system in EverQuest: Next and how it relates to the Four Holy Grails that Dave presented at SOE Live last year.

EverQuest: Next - Combining the Best to make the Best

Lets give a little love to Lucky Saint on youtube who put together this quick summery of some of the great features to look forward to in EverQuest: Next.



I will go into more detail in later posts, but for now let me introduce you to the 4 Holy Grail of EQ:N that back up what Lucky Saint has said here. If you want to see it directly, most of what I present below can be seen in the second half of the Debut footage from last years SOE Live, but other interviews and presentations have cleared up several details as well. This might get rather long, but it is a lot shorter than hunting down all those interviews to get every detail (I've spent the last few weeks doing just that).

Grail 1: Changing the Core Game
A vast and robust system of Multi-Classing with over 40 classes at launch to explore and find in the world (starting with one of 8 when you make your character). The more classes you find the more you can customize your character to choose how you want to play. This is quite cool, though... multi-classing has been done before with many different methods. Other aspects explored below really drive home this Grail for me. Though, I would also point out here, a major change is getting rid of Levels.

There will be 5 Tiers that represent a players skill with their class's abilities and mechanics, not just 'how much xp you farmed' on that class. There will be several different measures for determining when you have mastered an aspect of a class and you will then be rewarded with different tools to learn and experiment with, but these tools won't be more powerful. Seeing a Tier 5 warrior fight a Tier 1 warrior won't mean the T1 just dies at a single swing. If the T1 is a better player and knows their opponent well they will win, the T5 just has more options available to them for how they want to build their character. If they planned the fight ahead of time the T5 will have an advantage in already knowing what build the T1 will have (same as any T1 warrior) and can specialize their design to face that using the wider variety of tools available to them.

By having all content be relevant to even max characters the designers don't have to split their focus between 'leveling content' and 'end game content' like they currently do. That will mean more content for everyone.

Grail 2: Destructibility
"We wanted to be able to blow up anything, anytime, anywhere." By building the entire world out of voxels (think of 3d pixels) which means that this world can be easily built and destroyed. The possibilities here are just.... so awesome. The world is not going to be limited to the surface either, several layers of chasms below, earth quacks will change the subterranean landscape, you will be able to dig down into the world to find different content, you can actually tear down the enemies walls or destroy a bridge as they cross it. With the ability to destroy and build and shift the world this also means never ending exploration potential. Complete destructibility opens up so much possible game play we have never seen before.

Grail 3: A Life of Consequence
Everything you do in game the game will remember, and the new Emergent AI will have everything respond to your history. Instead of programming monsters (mobs) to always show up at one place and attack you forever they will be programmed with likes, dislikes, desires, wants, physical needs, "and then release them into the world." The mobs and other Non-Player Characters (NPCs) will all have their own little lives continuing even when you aren't around. "Merchants don't like the dark, so they go home." And shady merchants don't like being seen by guards, so the dark of night is their friend. If you fight the goblins hard enough they might leave the forest, or their king might decide to rally an army to attack your city.

With your actions each NPC and mob will like what you do or dislike what you do and will react accordingly. You can even establish relationships with NPCs. Perhaps you visit Angy the baker every day and smile. Angy likes that you bring her a smile every day and eventually asks if you will help her get things she needs for better baking in exchange for free pastries. This is a deal that not everyone has and not everyone can get. It's not unbalancing, but it is personal, and everyone can establish different relationships with different NPCs. Angy's husband, the blacksmith, might not like 'your flirting' with her and decides to charge you more for his services, and unless you ask about his surly attitude toward you, you probably won't ever know why.

The Emergent AI is being programmed by an awesome company called Storybricks which makes dynamic scripting much easier. No longer will you need to be a programmer to be able to design an NPC or mob, you can just take the various 'bricks' and assemble them for a given NPC or mob and those bricks will automatically reference all relevant code and tags in the world and on the players. Even more awesome is that if the NPC encounters a situation that its current bricks can't handle then the system will compare the current bricks with the bricks available and the situation and will then select a new brick to add to the NPC, forever making that a part of the NPC for future interactions. SELF LEARNING NPCs! This is the part which has some people claiming that 'Storybricks is programming the system that will become Skynet and start sending Terminator robots to kill us all.'

Suffice it to say, this totally changes the face of MMO's forever. Mobs and NPCs will learn and adapt to your strategies. The old Tank & Spank and the Trinity of MMOs just won't work anymore.

Grail 4: Permanent Change
Another application of the Storybricks Emergent AI will be major events called Rallying Calls which will cause large scale permanent change. This could be the building or destruction of a city, a major war, huge natural disasters, all kinds of huge events. How players handle these on each server, or how/when they accidentally trigger a Rallying Call's progression steps will make every server a unique world. Cities on one server might not exist on another. If you were to play for a few years then roll up a new character it will literally be impossible to have the same gaming experience, the entire world would have changed.

Players will have so much personal history and stories to tell of how, "I was here, on the front lines when this city was built. That was before the goblin invasion, and before the red dragon attack, and that was before the civil war. Yeah, this city has grown a lot in the years I've been defending it. A lot of NPCs here I really care about. Though, I wasn't able to save Angy the baker, the dragon.... I couldn't save her." It is these types of personal stories and experiences that really help a game feel vibrant and personal for years to come. EQ:N is being designed to last for decades, not just to grab your money and run.

But That's Not All!
These are the Four Holy Grails of EverQuest: Next. While developing the tools to build this they decided to create Landmark. Landmark is a separate game in which they will give us all of the tools needed to make EQ:N and let us a) build any type of game we want (unless it is 'obscene') and b) help build EQ:N with the devs. Already we have been designing the architecture of the Dark Elves and are currently working on the Kerran architecture. Right now we can only build structures, but eventually we will have Storybricks as well so we can program NPCs and mobs the way we want to. But I'm now getting a lot deeper than I should for this post. More on that stuff another time.

Welcome to World Builder Thorn

Hello, World Builder Thorn here, I've been writing things all over the net regarding various games and project and it was recently recommended that I create a blog to share my ideas and link to these rather than directly to shared google docs, which I have been doing. While I'm at it, I would also like to highlight other reviewers and content developers in the field.

So, what should you expect to see on this blog?
First and Foremost you will see my thoughts on video games and literature; the creation of, the culture around, and the playing/reading of. Culture... yes. I am a student of Sociology, so cultural analysis is very important to me and it is a very major part of how I look at all things in life. Which leads to another portion of this blog, social change. I will be talking about social change as we see it in literature, TV and movies, social media, and yes, video games.

At present I am working on two major projects and you will likely hear a lot about them for some time.

EverQuest: Next & Landmark
These games by Sony Online Entertainment are so unique and interesting and I am involved in the largest development team in history trying to build them. I am a Trailblazer member in the Closed Beta of Landmark at the moment. I am not much of a builder yet, but I'm trying to learn. Expect a small flood of posts regarding these games as I have been creating documents for them for several months. While I won't be attending, SOE Live is not very far off, so I've been scouring over every interview and scrap of information I can to see what the devs have said is coming, either on purpose or by accident.

Xamesh & The Galactic Commonwealth
This is a very large social change writing project I have been working on for the past several years. It is mostly presented in the form of vignettes (very short stories covering one event or encounter) that are knitted together to form a much larger story of the entire world and events. It will touch on all kinds of social issues while hopefully remaining fun at every step.

Some content discussed will be things that are not typically 'allowed' to be discussed, however, I will avoid treating these topics flippantly. Everything on this blog should be either SFW or require clicking through to the NSFW content. I will try to tag my posts appropriately so you can skip content you don't want to view.