Unhelpful

It’s 1985. The game is Questron. The machine is a Commodore 64. It’s an FRPG, it’s pretty entertaining, and it introduced me to the concept which I believe will be the key to making a long-term successful MRPG: the sub-game. In fact, it may be what saves the genre.

Am I overstressing the point? It’s certainly possible, but I doubt it. Right now, you have a total of three mass-market MRPGs. All three are fantasy-based. The first sci-fi MRPG to market will do well by default. It will share a marketing strategy in common with the early days of UO: lack of serious competition. There are only so many of these “free rides” left, though.

In the absence of this, the key to long-term viability is to give the players something to do. Obviously, in an MRPG, there’s usually going to be a LOT to do. Monster fighting, PvP, socializing, powergaming, exploring, and testing the magic or feudal systems such a game might employ. But that’s not necessarily enough.

Now, though it was my first exposure to a sub-game in an FRPG, I suspect that Questron was probably not the first FRPG with this feature. Whatever the case, it certainly wasn’t the last. The concept of the sub-game has been a part of the FRPG genre pretty consistently since. When a good game has a fun sub-game, such as Questron, that’s a win-win situation. Recently, there have been very bad games with fun sub-games (Might and Magic 7’s Arcomage), and very good games with pointless, un-fun sub-games (Baldur’s Gate’s simple gambling games).

Ultima Online continued this tradition with checkers, chess, backgammon, and dice. As is befitting UO’s very “loose” interface, it was literally a board and pieces in the case of the first three. You could position the pieces however you wanted, the board was just an object, it wasn’t enforcing rules to a set game - that was up to players. It worked if you had two people that actually wanted to play, but it wasn’t conducive to activity such as competitive tournament play.

The success of multi-player social gaming environments is an established fact. There are many sites offering a variety of board, card, and parlor games, including MSN Gaming Zone, Yahoo! Games, and flipside.com (formerly won.net). There are, of course, more specialized companies running online gambling concerns out of servers in Caribbean tax shelter nations such as Anguilla and Trinidad. I’d provide specific linked examples, but I’m loathe to do so without knowing which ones are reputable and which ones have little or no history. Caveat Emptor.

You can probably see where I’m going with this; it’s obvious. What I’m suggesting, however, is not only is the merging of an MRPG environment with good entertaining sub-games a good thing, but done right, it can be what differentiates one product from another in the fragmented genre of MRPG titles in the near future.

They key to success in the MRPG market of three years from now is bringing in a new segment of the gaming market. Companies making new fantasy MRPGs for the current fantasy MRPG audience are going to find out really quickly that it’s a zero-sum game. You either woo players away from existing titles, or you can’t get in the black. The first sci-fi MRPG to market is going to attract an audience that is, in part, not already playing fantasy MRPGs. The first MRPG to be specifically targeted at children (and I don’t envy the amount of responsible administration needed to keep an anonymous audience child-friendly) will bring in new players. The first sports-based MRPG (don’t think for a second it’s not in development - there’s already a netplay console football game - imagine when it won’t require members of the same team to be on the same machine) will bring in a lot of new players.

And there’s that group out there, the social parlor/card game players. They’re you and your friends, but they’re not just those of us who are comfortable in MRPGs, FPS, and RTS games. They’re your mother, your aunts, your grandfather, and your neighbors who are using the first computer they’ve ever owned.

Will it get to the point where all MRPGs worth a fraction of marketshare will have a fairly involved set of sub-games? I suspect so, and I hope so.

A modular design is important. You don’t want to be having your main development team faced with the decision of including either a fix for the latest dual-wield sword bug or fixing the Dragon Chess (issue #100 anyone?) subsystem. The integration between MRPG and sub-game is going to be subtle, but it will need to exist. MRPGs are competitive environments, and while it’s certainly commonplace for lots of people not to be caught up in the powerlevelling and dual-centric PVP scene, almost everyone has that competitive urge, whether it manifests itself in being the first to kill the Seventh Lord of Chaos or if it involves beating an old friend at poker. They’re playing these games anyway, so serve the games to your customers in your world, on shared terms.

The modular design allows you to have a team dedicated to a specific sub-game, be it checkers, a chess or poker variant, or something new that you invent from scratch to give your wider MRPG a distinct flavor. In fact, maybe the chosen diversions in your game world vary from place to place, just as it does in our world. But in any case, the modular system lets you add new content, just like the online social game sites do now. If MSG Gaming Zone adds a new Poker variant, you don’t have to download a new web browser, or even a new Zone client, though you will be downloading some new client data. And much like the existing web-integrated gaming environments, they can fix a bug or add a feature to, say, checkers without affecting blackjack.

There’s an issue of server load, of course, but the demands of these (mostly turn-based) parlor, card, and casino games are usually much more modest than the demands imposed by a typical MRPG keeping track of real-time player location and dynamic movement in an environment with multiple allies, enemies, and contact and distance weapons with a chat layer over top. A character sitting at a poker variant table for 20 minutes sure is simple to track - he or she is sitting. Even though more ambitious games that involve virtual space (such as a team contact sport or pool) involve more active location tracking, the parameters of possible action are going to be smaller: It’s probably safe to assume that allowing Fred the Angry Alchemist to bust a wicked Kung Fu Death Spiral Kick on Bob the Sneezing Warrior probably isn’t necessary when the two of them are engaged in a polo match on their six-legged horses.

Though modular, ideally a game should have an effect. If you’re playing hearts or chess, you should have a rating based on your success or lack thereof. If you’re a pro at the local dice or card game, maybe you have dice or cards that look a little bit better than those in play by those new to the sub-game. A champion in a tournament might have an entry automatically added into a biography page and be eligible for a slot in the monthly high-stakes game. What better money sink than gambling?

For sci-fi MRPGs that take place in a near-future or historical fiction MRPGs, the games may be familiar for the most part. In a fantasy MRPG, combining some of the familiar (such as chess, parcheesi, and hearts) with games that are specific to your world, though they may be based in part on popular games (such as Might and Magic 7’s Arcomage was based loosely on a simplified version of Magic the Gathering) as the centerpieces.

This will add significantly to an MRPG game. It will add players who might not normally be interested in games of this genre, and it will keep your players in your game for a longer term. It also adds variety to your game, and that’s good for the long-term health of any game, MRPG or otherwise.

Now I only wish I could play Arcomage with real people and without that nasty Might and Magic 7 installed.

Discuss: Comments? Cribbage? Chess? Chinese checkers? [dead link]