The Eye of Ba'al

Somes games are not much more fun than seeing how many mouse clicks I can make... I'm into month 4 and I'm up to seven million mouse clicks, I'm so über.

I think we can do better.

How is battle not going to be a grind?

Consider the following games: chess, go, sokobon. These games have very simple rules, and yet produce very engaging gameplay. We are aiming to completely break free of the DnD battle model, and move towards a strategic battle model that, again with simple rules, is very engaging. We don't know if we will achieve that, but we are trying. This is not about pressing buttons quickly, but about solving a puzzle. We are also incorporating game theory concepts such as prisoner's dilemma type situations among multiparty play, encouraging possible subterfuge and deception beween grouped players, rather than players always cooperating within groups against the mob.

How else will the game not be a grind?

For one, there will be PvP. So you cannot just run from point A to point B if other players might ambush you... you must be on guard and ready.

Also, there will be scripting (see question about this below). So if anything does turn into a grind, you are welcome, encouraged even, to script it.

There is going to be PvP?

Yes, there will be PvP.

I've talked to a number of people who don't like PvP, and it seems to me that the main concern is that there will always be very dedicated players who intend to kill you for sport, and thus if you want to play casually, you will frequently be killed and the game becomes very un-fun very fast.

I think PvP has been implemented very poorly in most games, starting with the disasterous experience of PvP in UO, and so it has gotten a bad rap. But PvP can be done well.

EVE Online, for one, does a fairly good job of managing PvP. In EVE Online, you can live your entire existance in safe zones and still become very rich and successful. If you join any decent corporation, you have a social network which provides safety for those risky zones. Getting ganked doesn't happen too often. Very powerful ships are not necessarily very powerful against very weak ships (most of the firepower flows right past). If you are on guard you can almost always escape. And since space is so damn big, hiding is easy (people can search you out, but it takes time). When you do get killed, it can often escalate into wars or diplomatic negoations, so the PvP ends up sparking exciting social situations.

We are not going to do PvP the same way, of course. Our world is vastly different. In The Eye of Ba'al, defense will be much easier than offense. Methods of escape will be common and various. Defensive strength increases towards areas you have preconfigured (protecting the homeland). And the goals of achievement in this game are not all about PvP. PKing will be a difficult specialty.

I find PvP to be necessary in order for a game to be truly engaging. If you are playing against a computer, you can never be truly challenged, nor can you ever be truly emotionally engaged. A computer-controlled skeleton has never excited fear in my belly the same way a known-to-be-human-PKer entering the room has. It's really another whole dimension of engagement.

PvP creates communities. It's hard to solo with large PvP groups roaming the lands. PvP creates heroes. Without villains, there can be no heroes. When you kill a player villian, the sense of satisfaction you achieve, and the social community support and fame you win, are palpable. There is no comparison.

So there are a lot of mechanisms to make PvP available, but much less of a big scary deal than you might think. I don't expect it to be a big issue, although I cannot predict what will happen.

What classes are there? What races are there?

I cannot answer this yet. We want to have a very large set of races. But classes are intended to be role-played.

I never liked the fact that at the beginning of most RPGs, you are forced to chose a class. And that decision affects everything. While you may research it as much as you can, and distribute various points optimally, you will always inevitably learn things during gameplay that may make you regret certain decisions, or wish your character was just a little bit different (ah... I wish I had a priest, not a cleric, that's what I was going for). In my view, a necro spell should be available to everybody, but just much more difficult to achieve if you are presently, for instance, a paladin. We are developing a complex spiderweb of skills and abilities that, while some are mutually exclusive, all are always available to every player if you put in the effort. You simply must be willing to lessen some aspects of yourself in order to get better at other aspects.

As for races, there will be permanent differences, limits which you cannot exceed in your chosen race that other characters will exceed due to their different race choices. But these will be clearly laid out, and will have much less of an impact as class does in other games.

Are there levels? What is the level cap?

The concept of levels takes a complex world and simplifies it into a singular goal. Some games have realized the folly in this and split of crafting (and now diplomacy in Vanguard SOH) as seperate levelling spheres. But I never understood why there should be a generalized level seperate from skills and abilities.

When I think of a level 42 cleric, I don't think of a player who has chosen the role of cleric from the very beginning, and then killed monsters to get to level 42. I think of someone who has done enough healing to get to level 42 skill in clericmanship. If you do a lot of killing, conversely, you get better at killing, and it doesn't improve your ability to heal. Killing, clericmanship, or whatever we come up with, will be skills anyone can acquire, not classes you are pigeonholed into. But be aware, some races will be better at some skills than other races based on underlying characteristics of those races. So, instead of a level, there will be hundreds of skills, each with it's own level.

What sorts of cool things can I achieve?

As players progress down certain paths, their character models will change markedly. Your achievements will be no secret. You may be surprised when a player comes into view who is much much larger than most everybody else, or who shines bright white light across most of what you can see, or who is so dark you can hardly make them out, or who causes the landscape around them to warp in their presence.

Most MMORPGs throw in all the cool effects right at the beginning. They differentiate between a few classes and races -- you might see another race and think "wow, that thing they do, that's cool". But as players progress, they don't really get that much different. Perhaps better looking armor. But really, the spell particles all look about the same, confusingly so. Even the things people fight are the same. I was suprised to be fighting beetles and spiders at level 40.

In the Eye of Ba'al there is a clear and marked difference and progression as you move along the achievement path towards any particular end. The game may start out pretty bland, but with time invested, it becomes epic.

That's another point of distinction between us and a commercial outfit. With a commercial outfit, they have to throw all the cool effects at you from the beginning to try to get you hooked. And then as time progresses, you learn they don't have much else to offer. We hold back the lions share of effects, art, even the best lore, for the advanced play.

Is there any game lore I can read?

Not yet. Because game lore will be very integral to this game.

Game lore in other games has consistently disappointed me. Several time I have gotten myself really excited and worked up about a new game, studied the lore, hoping to have an advantage, hoping to solve some hidden riddle, hoping I could get into the game and take advantage of the lore I studied. No such luck.

I have heard from lore writers who have become very dissatisfied and jaded by the gaming community. Players don't bother to read the lore. The lore writers out there have produced marvellous stuff. And it's not the fault of the content itself. It's the fault of management.

Game lore, rather than being integral, has been pasted on like vaneer over MDF. In most MMORPGs, game lore is almost entirely seperate from game content. I don't blame players for passing it over. The lore is pointless, unrelated. It just slows you down. The game puts at odds the goal of achievement (race on through) with the goal of having fun and immersing yourself by reading the lore. Those goals should have never been put at odds.

We believe that lore needs to be on the critical path, such that it is at least more difficult, and perhaps impossible, to progress along certain game paths without reading, studying, and possibly even solving the lore.

What about realism? Is the game going to be as phony as these questions on this webpage?

(Nobody submitted these questions, this is not a FAQ, these are just a way for me to organize my thoughts)

I've always been fond of realism. Of course you can only take this so far, but it must be taken far enough to fool your lower mind, in order for the game to grab you. The lower mind does not comprehend time, nor can it distinguish fantasy from reality. That is why you feel emotions when you watch a movie, even though you know it's not real. So the fact that the game is clearly known to be a fantasy by your higher mind doesn't normally interfere with your ability to pretend and enjoy. But if your lower mind detects too many inconsistencies, you will lose your fantasy in a harsh and displeasing way.

Consider a game with a wall with a picture of a switch on the wall. Perhaps you think "aha! maybe this switch will open the gate" but for all your trying it turns out it was just a drawing of a switch in the graphics. That kind of thing really irks me. What about fighting a skeleton holding a long sword, and when he dies, he doesn't have it in his corpse? What about a rat that drops platemail? What about taking a big bag and sewing it into several smaller bags? What? No such recipe? But I'm sure this is enough leather, and damn it I'm a master seamstress!

Inconsistencies like these are not only irritating, they make it impossible to devise strategies based on discovery and creativity. If your creative ideas are constantly dashed against the rocks, and you are forced to do it the way the game designers intended, then you are just a slave playing a grind.

In most MMORPGs you can't be creative like turning a bag into smaller bags because most games require a designer to specify exactly what can and cannot be done, and there are just way too many possibilities that can be imagined.

In the Eye of Ba'al we take a different approach. We specify the low level physics of the game, conservation of matter and energy, chemistry rules, object size and containment rules, material rules, etc. How they get applied by you as a player is up to you, and your creativity can be unleashed. Things will progress unpredictably to us designers, but we are not afraid, because with consistent underlying rules, we know that we can constrain most (hopefully all) possible meltdown scenerios. So we don't fear the unknown result of what our alterworld will develop into, but rather we look forward to being suprised by what people come up with.

Is the world dynamic? Can I have any lasting effect on the world?

Absolutely.

In almost every MMORPGs, you absolutely can't. And in most, you only have a very small effect. EVE Online does a rather good job of bucking the trend here... I need to point them out as an exception.

In most MMORPGs, the world has been designed around pre-engineered content, which requires a certain "state of things" to be consistent. As such, you may kill a monster, but in a few minutes, pop! here he is, he's back! Nothing you do ever really changes the world.

We intend to have deformable landscape, hills that get mined away into valleys, races of beasts which morph over time through evolution, or get slaughered to near extinction (though we will probably prevent complete extinction for the simple reason that we need diversity to keep the game interesting).

How do I win?

There is no such thing. If you have no creative passion, if you can't come up with your own goals, then you should not play The Eye of Ba'al but play one of the grind games instead. If you can't think of a goal, then try to be the best armorsmith. I could use one of those.

Are there quests? Can I research them on the Internet?

Yes, there will be quests. But I prefer to avoid the simple checklist quests like "kill 3 kobolds, and run talk to Joe over there."

Especially in the beginning, for tutorial and orientation purposes, there will be quests. Also, as you enter new areas or cities there may be orientation quests as ways to familiarize yourself with the features and social structure of the area.

But there will be lots of questing that isn't in a well-known quest-like form. The more intricate and interesting pre-designed content will be in the areas of the physics, skills, and exploration. Discovering what does what, how things combine, ancient research notes, the interconnection between something over here in the game, and something over there that puts an itch in your mind and makes you wonder, finding the best way to kill skeletons, figuring out how to make swords sharper, tricking other players into a trap, learning to herd rats over a cliff because you need their skins to make bags... these will be the kinds of things you will discover and quest for. And I'm barely touching the surface here.

The concept of a pre-determined storyline quest that is programmed by a game developer, has never worked for me, but I know others enjoy them, so I'm not sure what we will do. One problem with them is that they are static but our world is dynamic. Further, people are compelled to look up spoilers on the Internet, again putting at odds with each other the goals of winning (looking it up) and the goals of having fun (playing it out). I personally choose the goal of winning every time, and end up quite dissatisfied, but I can't get myself to neglect the shortcut. I'm sure I'm not the only person that is unimpressed with this situation.

What about gold farmers and cheats?

This game has been designed around a closed system of physics. Matter can not be created or destroyed. Some forms of matter, like gold, are also immutable. The server never just "creates" a reward for your quest, for instance. Rather, it moves something that already exists, to you. It's a closed economy, and a closed physical system. In this way, many of the problems caused by farmers and cheats cannot develop.

However we are of course aware of many ways of cheating that may come up and are working to identify and squash them as early as possible in development.

What about scripts and bots?

There is no way to fundamentally tell the difference between a person and a computer. If a game client allows people to enter commands, it can always be subverted to allow scripts and bots to enter commands.

So rather than beat them, we have decided to join them. And in fact this decision has solved one of the most fundamental problems of MMORPGs... the grind. As a player, once you figure out how to do something, and you don't want to bother with the actual mechanics of doing it anymore, you are encouraged to script that action. You get the benefit, maximize your performance, and can get on with the more interesting parts of gameplay. A user-friendly scripting language will be built into the client so no hacks will be necessary.

Will there be multiple server worlds?

Probably not. I really hope not. Breaking up the game into multiple different non-interacting worlds with completely seperate history timelines detracts from the social cohesion, the sense of realness of the alterworld. It's hard enough to swallow and get wrapped up in the idea of an alterworld, much more so if there are many of them, and non-interacting. It's also a bummer if one of your friends plays on one server, and another on a different server. While this problem will always remain between games, I don't want to exacerbate it within a game.

Multiple servers may be necessary for massive games, but is unlikely for ours. And I'm glad for it.

Will there be instancing?

For many of the same reasons that there will not be multiple server worlds, there will also not be instancing. Additionally, PvP and instancing don't mix very well.

What about zones?

On the client, the technology is such that we don't need zones. The world can appear seamless. However, on the server, in order to distribute load to multiple machines, zones may become necessary. At this point, I'm not entirely sure if we can devise a zoneless system, but I would prefer it.

When is this game going to be released?

I do not know.