Icarus Studios News

Many modern video games, particularly MMOs, have an unbroken line of evolution back through MUDs, past tabletop RPGs, to wargames. Many conceits common to video game engines are little changed from their origins 40 years ago: hit points, consumable items that heal damage or buff, character classes and party roles, dungeons, etc. Of course, these little-changed elements were not originally intended for the play style of a modern MMO. Instead, they were meant to color hours or days of playtime, not to reset completely as soon as the avatar can take a rest break. Hit points and mana bars have, in particular, gone from semi-realistic abstractions of wounds and fatigue (that might maintain their state for days) to arbitrary timers for how long a single fight can persist before a player will die, rest, or flee. Many games are even moving to hit point systems that refresh almost instantly as soon as the avatar is out of direct fire, made famous by Halo 2’s shield.

These adaptations to the online form make for a level playing field and gameplay that can be taken in as small a chunk as the player desires, but they tend to eliminate the long-term tactical resource management play they were originally designed to model. Put simply, when it’s easy to heal between every fight, there’s no building tension towards the last fight in a series: the avatar is just as prepared for the last fight as for the first. Yet this kind of building tension is very useful from a storytelling perspective. This conflict between system and story is one reason why designers keep putting “trash” monsters before bosses in dungeon instances even though players keep complaining about them.

Since MMO designers cannot really use hit points and mana as abstract long-term timers, the trend has been to use concrete, actual timers. Tension is built in dungeons not because you’ll be weaker by the time you reach the boss, but because monsters will start to respawn if you don’t kill the boss within a certain time window. Resource management is switched from whether you have enough mana left to use your abilities to hard limits (called cooldowns) on how often you can use your abilities. However, this changes the tension from resource management to gambling.

With traditional hit point and mana meters, playing smart means getting the biggest effect from the smallest resource expenditure. It may or may not be a good idea for you to use your big spell several times in a row, since it takes a lot of mana each time. With cooldowns and other timers, playing smart means making educated gambles on whether now is the best time to use your abilities. If you need your big spell again soon, you’re out of luck, but you’re also not getting any benefit if you wait for the perfect moment too long (since you could have used the ability multiple times while you waited). A risk-taking player uses a long-cooldown ability as soon as it is not an excessive use of force, and thus gets to use it more often than the conservative player, but the conservative player is more likely to have the ability available when a surprisingly difficult situation arises.

Timer-based systems are probably a permanent replacement for resource-based ones in MMOs, at least until something even better comes along. Video games that have tried to maintain the traditional multi-fight hit point meter, such as games based on D&D, tend to find that players are quite happy to do whatever is necessary to get back to full resources between most fights, so the traditional method does not serve its original purpose. Hybrid methods of resources and timers (e.g., defeat the dungeon without enough time to rest) can work, but tend to make the players feel stressed and rushed if over-used. Ultimately, MMO challenges support an entirely different rhythm of tension than traditional game styles, and good designers will adapt their levels and stories to take advantage of the systems rather than being limited by them.

-Stephen Cheney, Virtual Worlds Team