Comments on: Improving Roleplaying: Props, emotes, Titles, Class Design, and Dressing the Set

By: A holiday, a holiday, the first one of the year! Best of 2009. « Welcome to Spinksville!

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:07:55 +0000

[...] Improving Roleplay: Props, Emotes, and Dressing the Set [...]

By: spinks

spinks — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:43:06 +0000

You’re right, a lot of this is pie in the sky stuff. I’m not suggesting designers do all of these things.

But graphics such as town guard costumes already are in the game, on NPCs, for example.

By: spinks

spinks — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:42:02 +0000

See, this makes me think of another possibility. I know in Age of Conan you can make your own dances by stringing together a macro of dance moves together.

What if we had a vocabulary of small emotes and you could string them together to make your own? Sure, there’d be people who’d use them to emote having sex (but they do that already) but it would be another way to customise your character.

Now that I’ve thought of it, I wonder why more games don’t do it

By: DBlade

DBlade — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 07:38:06 +0000

It’s text because of limited resources. I don’t think current tech has the capability of rendering thousands of pieces of armor, props or not, across multiple races and genders. You also have to test them and make them conform to each classes animations for spellcasting, for normal attacks, and for all the /emote positions. It’s an awful lot of work, and I think it’s why a lot of MMO’s have their characters look sameish as they level up.

With emotes, it sounds cool, and I’ve seen some good ones; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptJqePt9Flw has a pet emote, with the Dragoon’s Wyvern doing it. But man, did people bitch about the dev team wasting time on emotes over other things.

By: Lani

Lani — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:19:04 +0000

From the sound of it, Vanguard SoH is a pretty Roleplay friendly game. Most of what’s proposed here’s already in that game.

By: Klepsacovic

Klepsacovic — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:40:01 +0000

This makes me thing of Red vs. Blue and how they do so much with actors shoved into expressionless armor. Maybe the problem isn’t the lack of props, but of effort, that perhaps we can make our own emotes for surprise and happiness and all that, without needing all that much more from the game. Not that it wouldn’t help.

By: xXJayeDuBXx

xXJayeDuBXx — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:31:47 +0000

Love the idea of emotes, specially class emotes.

By: spinks

spinks — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:14:46 +0000

The thing with class design is that whatever it is you are actually doing in game, it’s an abstract compared to what you’d really be doing. Threat is weird but it does work (it makes the monsties focus on the guy with the heavy armour and shield).

By: Stabs

Stabs — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:26:16 +0000

I’m pretty ambivalent about pets.

On the one hand Hunter pets and to a lesser extent Warlock pets are fantastic for emergent RP. Give a non-RPer a nice tiger pet and let them name it and they’ll start saying things like “you hurt Fluffy’s feelings” instead of viewing it as a spreadsheet or a dps buff. It’s actually the best example of emergent RP in WOW. The game design encourages RP whether you see yourself as a RPer or not.

On the other hand minipets are very anti-immersive. “Wow cool pet, where does it drop, what’s the spawn percentage, how much are they on the AH, I only need 3 more for achievement”. Not to mention lore-breakers like mini-Diablo.

“One good thing about the holy triad (tanks, healers, dps) is that these roles are very effective for immersion.”

Ah but the system is terrible for immersion. It relies on artificial mechanics that don’t make sense. The evil genius pounds away ineffectually on the armoured guy ignoring the healers. The slime is taunted – how? “Your mother was a slimeball” is hardly an insult in that case.

It’s a games mechanics system that destroys believability.

By: Longasc

Longasc — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:34:21 +0000

Cantrips for Wizards or slam fist emotes for Warriors would be a great addition.
Why are emotes still type /STUFF commands? I wonder if a context sensitive emote-bar with the “more” option would not be a great help. If someone nods, you get the option to nod, shake heads or laugh and “MORE” to see the full emote bar.

Item interaction is very poor in our fancy wallpaper-world MMOs. Most interaction is still combat and picking up icons from loot bags or from the inside of corpses. Ewww.
As long as items get destroyed once we drop them to the ground, I see no major interactions with the world possible in MMOs. Housing system are still way behind Ultima Online, maybe for a good reason. Housing created a lot of server stress and lag. But this was possible 11 years ago already, and today’s technology should be able to handle the very same system better, if not even improve it to be less demanding.

You should have seen emotes fired on certain text triggers. LOL in Aion makes the char do the “laugh&lol” dance, while an unknown but quite common phrases must somehow always made me assume a “victory posture”, flapping wings and rising to the sky plus raising the right fist. Saying “funny” made my avatar laugh and so on.

The fully automated emote system is a bit crude, and Aion has tons of cool emotes but you do not drag them on your bar as there too many of them, and it has no proper interface for them. I still suggest an emote window that you can pop up with CTRL+E for example in addition to the text based / commands.

The emotional “role” attachment associated with classes is probably one of the reasons why the unholy trinity still exists.

I would like to see better emote interfaces and most importantly more ways to interact with items in the world, i.e. the world itself.