http://www.johnnylaird.net/2010/07/the-afrocyberpunk-interview/

J

MMORPGs follow a formula which seems to have been crafted by someone who never played PnP RPGs, but rather just heard about them second hand. Since the early days of DnD, through Traveler, Shadowrun, The Paladium Multiverse, Dark Conspiracy, etc. the PnP campaigns I’ve taken part in have never been even remotely like any MMO wich has come out.

Some campaigns are boring where the GM just lets us go out on hack n slash adventures, lvl up, collect better gear, forever, and never die without somehow being resurected. It would seem that this sort of campaign was the target of the MMO formula, which is sad because this is the worst kind of campaign run by the worst GMs. But even with this low mark as the target the MMO formula missed by a mile because even in these campaigns, interaction with the environment can play crucial roles in encounters, and a sneak skill would never let you turn invisble while standing directly in front of a character in broad daylight. And even in these campaigns, a climbing skill would let you at least attempt to climb just about any rocky wall or tree. Rope is often usefull for climbing and for tieing up uncooperative cargo. I could go on and on. But a lot of these things will be the same for the comparison with a really great campaign, which should be the goal of a great MMORPG anyway.

When you have a really great GM (which is a somewhat rare treasure) that’s when PnP RPGs really shine. I the campaigns I’ve played with the best GMs our characters rarely reach lvl 12 because they *die* and access to any form of resurection is appropriatly rare. We are able to accumulate lots of cool stuff and powerful gear but we lose most or all of it relatively easily and often as well. The world does not feel static, it is populate with lots of interesting characters and unfolding stories. We certainly don’t always win, and are not gauranteed success. Often our objectives are self determined or at least partially self determined. Do we want to help the downtrodden villagers or sell them out, or trick them into stasis pods so we can deliver them to a 2000 year old necromancer who tricked us into owing him 500 slaves..

What MMOs need to be truly fun and engaging as opposed to simply pretty and addictive, is all you would need to make a cyberpunk MMO abolutely phenominal:

Random character generators to generate NPCs and random monster generators too while your at it.

Important NPCs (like quest givers and merchants) that move arround and have lives. Unimportant NPCs that move arround and ‘appear’ to have lives. So the streets are full of people who go through all sorts of motions and have responses to creat the illusion of life, while more important NPCs have more detailed lives.

The ability to disagree with NPCs, get into arguments with them which can escalate into violence. This plays well with the idea of some quest givers playing the players, tricking them, taking advantage of them, sending them into traps, or just plain double crossing them, but always leaving opportunities for the players to turn the tables on such nefarious NPCs. Of course not all quest givers would be out to screw you, but you should still have plenty of opportunities to screw them if that’s the kind of character you want to play.

Sometimes important NPCs should venture out into other more active areas of the game play. In our PnP campaigns it was always engaging running into some familiar NPC in some screwed up situation, or having a major AHA moment when we finaly meet the guy who hired us and realize it’s the same old man we rescued from the deathpits. And then we’re pissed when we realize he tricked us into killing everyone when the job was supposed to be a simple exchange.

Which brings me to the next point. Evolving and flexible quest objectives, with some randomization. For instance, a job to steal some prototype, but there is an opportunity to double cross the quest giver and sell to someone else for much more, which results in him sending a hit squad to intercept the transaction. But it won’t play out like that every time. The opotunity to sell to someone else may be something you have to notice and it could come in several different ways, some more obvious, and some easier to miss. Or that opportunity may not even occur, instead there is an opportunity to make more by destroying the artifact, or there is an opportunity to get the keycode which makes the artifact a useable item which the player may like, and thus not want to deliver. So there is the main mission thread (possibly a string of several objectives) which is modied by somewhat randomized opportunities.

Random encounters which are engaging and could actively interfere with quest objectives. So you have the evolving quests as described above, but then additionally some random encounters that are unrelated to the quest could still effect the outcome of the quest. Say you have to deliver a vehicle to someone but someone jumps into the passenger seat at a red light and forces you out then takes off. It was not part of the quest, just a random encounter, but now you need to steal another vehicle and go after them ASAP before they get away with that very valuable vehicle.

Lots of opportunites to interact with other players, as well as NPCs, which are outside the context of group grinding and group missions and PvP. Trade with anyone, hire other players, talk with NPCs as a group – Maybe group leader could designate a primary spokesperson but there should still be the ability to interupt eachother (though the leader could revoke the ability to speak with NPCs from problematic players). In these group to NPC dialogues there should be both the opportunity often plenty of reasons to say “give us a moment, we need to talk this over amongst ourselves”, usually because there are real choices to be made.

This ties into the last one. You should get extra stacking, timed experience boosts for active role playing. By active I mean action oriented RPing, not talking in old english in the town square for no good reason. Things like coming to other players aid, hiring other players for jobs, taking jobs for other players, camping out in a tent when you get tired instead of just using the simple and faster ‘rest’ function, sitting and eating in restaurants instead of quick rations, recovering another players stolen goods, etc.. These are all optional, but by doing several you could stack up a major exp boost.

And to further extend the player to player interaction, players should be able to earn money and great rewards by taking on some NPC like jobs in the world. So sometimes the bartender might be a real player. Or when the police come, one of them might be controlled by a real player. Initially players would only be able to take some social type jobs (like the bartender example, or a quest giver) then other players who interacted with them would get a quick query about whether they played their part well or not, a window would pop up and you would just answer yes or no. So players would rate your work as an NPC and only after you proved you could follow instructions and play your part well would you be given any more sensitive jobs. I won’t go into to much more detail on this one but implemented well I think it could really help blur the lines between players and NPCs.

Whoever runs the game should hire a good number of people to actively participate in the world. To organize and execute lots of minor events and fairly major ones less often. These events should not be announced and should not be regularly timed (they could happen at any time day or night). Minor events should sometimes even be orchestrated for the sole benefit of one or two players out in the wilds. Players who proved themselves highly worthy in the NPC work mentioned previously could also be recruited into the priveledge of this kind of GM role on a volunteer basis to flesh out the smaller core of paid personel.

All NPCs should be killable. Even important ones. The random NPC generator would replace important NPCs with new ones. Not the same ones. If you kill Ottis the merchant after a while Angella would show up to setup shop.

There should be consecuences to killing. If you kill someone on a busy street, some form of enforcers/police should be called. If you escape you will remain wanted until you can clear your name (which there should be multiple ways of doing, but none of them easy). If you kill someone in a quiet alley (anyone) and no one see it, you should be safe. If a couple people saw it, and you kill 1 of those witnesses but another gets away, that one witness might report it, or they might not.

40% manual skill / 20% stategic skill / 15% judgement /
15% stats / 10% luck
so your stats can give you a real edge, but they can’t win the battle for you. It should also be setup so that a lvl 5 character can defeat a lvl 60 character, not in a head to head exchange of blows but through skill, strategy, and judgement. Weapons too should not have major differences in damage output. Weapons are tools made to kill (unless they are non-lethal) and most weapons are quite effective at killing. Whether someone chops your neck with a cheap machette, shoots your face with a 38 special, puts a live grenade between your feet, stabs you through the heart with a hydraulic drill spear, you are just as dead. And when you are level 200 it should not make it so that lvl 20 characters bullets bounce off your face like confetti. Choice of weapons should be more about play style, character style, and the feel of how the weapon performs.

All stats should be hidden. There is nothing less fun than having to learn exactly what build will be the most powerful and then having to stick to that build because everyone else has learned it and if you don’t you’ll be underpowered and unable to compete. The last one about skill, strategy and judgement should alleviate this issue for the most part but still. The game would be more immersive if we did not know how many points of damage each gun does because then there is really only one choice, the one that does the most damage and is within our budget. We shouldn’t need to know the specific stats because all weapons should be deadly anyway. The weapons should feel different and perform differently in lots of subtle ways so that people find personal favorites that seem extra sweet to them through expirementation.

Items should not be lvl based. Some items may have skill requirments and/or stat requirments which would make them not very feasible for players below a certain lvl but in most cases even then the gear should still be useable, but with some major (but feasable) penalties. A big chaingun that required strength and heavy weapon skill would make you move and aim very slow without enough strength and fire very innacurately without enough heavy weapon skill.

All items should be tradeable. The trend in games is seeing most MMOs now featuring character bound gear. This is stupid and nonsensical and is mostly tied into micro transactions, but it is also tied into not wanting to let new players spoil their game by getting all the best gear as hand me downs. The second one about hand me downs kind of taking some fun out of questing for good gear is valid but binding gear to players is not the solution. It is a cheap and easy quickfix which takes more fun out of the game then the problem did in the first place. One good solution is to have gear degrade with each owner who uses it. So second hand would not be as good as first hand, and third hand gear would be even worse, a fourth hand gun would be prone to jamming. NPCs pay less and less for this stuff too. Though again, in this game new players getting overpowered gear would be less of an issue because A) gear gives you an edge, it doesn’t make you overpowered and B) all weapons are deadly.

small baricades, fences, low walls etc. should always be passable. Don’t destroy the lvl of immersion by making my unable to climb over an 8 ft high cobblestone wall.

Death should be permanent. I know this is controversial but it doesn’t need to be. It is only so controversial because of the current MMO formula. People imagine grinding away for months and months only to lose it all and start over. If the game is really fun, no one will mind starting over, and there should be lots of opportunities to lose most and often all of you gear anyway, and your stats and gear only give you an edge anyway, they don’t determine winner and loser of every battle. The reall key thing here though is to make death very rewarding and make enough randomization that your next char won’t be doing all the same quests in the same way and nearly the same order. A rewarding death could be a multiple view dynamic video montage of your characters life and death, last will and testaments so your cash and gear would go to another player or another of your own chars, In game news outlets which would feature stories about player deaths, etc.. Also encourage multiple character creation when creating a character. Like have 4 slots to make 4 characters at the same time (you don’t have to use them but most probably would just because it is often hard to decide this or that, now you don’t have to you make a char like this and another like that simultaneously.

Make it so when a player logs in and starts playing one char his other chars become active in the world as well. taking jobs, exploring, working for other players, etc.. This would be a safe instance of your alt so if your alt char died while you weren’t controling it, the death wouldn’t be permanent, you would never even know about (unless you actually witnessed it). They would gain exp this way and score some new gear which they would stash at their home or vehicle or something and make some money too, but they wouldn’t do any of these things nearly as fast as if you were playing them directly. So now if you die you have a few alts who are not at square one.

Anyway, death would be common enough that the game would not/could not be all about getting to level 500 by grinding away at tedium. The game would be about enjoying the awesome gameplay, which should be just as awesome and fun at lvl 1 as it is at lvl 500. Characters making it past lvl 12 would be quite an achievment and lvl 20 characters would be very rare and considered to be seriously badass, though not completely untouchable. I guess that would put the lvl cap at around 60 which would make it virtually unreachable (which is a good thing because it kind of sucks when hit the ceiling and can’t really advance any more).

Not all mobs should give chase when running past them. Those that do give chase though should be pretty persistent. The should jump into water after the player (and not get stuck in the water), jump/climb over obstacles, call some of their friends (not everyone in the whole region though, unless you just blew up their storehouse). If it is a wild creature it should pursue you to it’s own peril, but if it is a human or inteligent foe, it should stop well short of gaurd posts at city gates and such – sneak around, climb over a wall, and look arround in town for you a bit before giving up and heading home.

Disguises should be possible. Improvised weapons. Destructible enviroments. No instancing. NPC quest givers that are numerous and active enough as well as blending in with other NPCs, moving, and being randomized to some extent so that you don’t have multiple groups and players trying to talk to the same NPCs and they don’t give the same quests out to multiple parties simultaneously. If you did happen to come upon a group talking to a quest giver you would see/hear their conversation, and the quest giver might tell you he was busy once before ignoring your interuptions until after the first group was done, then he might give you a different job (or he might try to kill you for having heard to much).

The mobs should be going about their business as well as the NPCs. In most MMOs you get the distinct impression that everyone in the world is standing around totally stationary in a static world until a player shows up. Raiders should be raiding villages, kidnapping people to sell as slaves, looting and pillaging, ambushing supply trucks, blowing things up. It would not be that hard to destroy this sense of static repetition by adding an illusion of life to the Mobs and NPCs alike.

A good cover system, acrobatic stunts that are usefull in combat, environments that lend themselves to strategic manuevering, and 38 other things to make the combat deeply engaging and not repetative.

I guess I could just go on and on. I’ve barely scratched the surface here. But that is already enough to break away from the tedious, boring, grindfest that is the mmo mould.

My main point, to get back on topic, is that the only reason a cyberpunk mmo wouldn’t work so well is because you are thinking inside the box of the integrally flawed prevalent mmo formula of the past 10 years, when it is high time we move past that.

To be fair too. Anarchy Online was pretty cyberpunk if you ask me. No hacking, but somethings that came pretty close to hacking, and data terminals. Cybernetic implants. Nanotech. Corporate state versus rebels. Lots of stuff that is fairly cyberpunk. Very rich crafting and tech oriented customization possibilities, and even wranging (getting high lvl buffs to bring stats up to get into gear with requirments much higher than yours, which you could keep even when buffs wear off, as long as you don’t take the gear off) which seemed almost like cheating, but was a rather involved process that required some planning, and felt cool – combine that with building your own implants and nanotech to wrangle into and it got pretty technical, but not overly so – and none of that was required to play and enjoy the game. AO was pretty succesfull and is still quite active today. But the bottom line was still that it followed the same basic flawed formula as all the other MMOs.

Let’s make something better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqaUJvsKfBg

Richard Epcar was a really great guy and barely needed me to moderate. ;)

Best Regards from Luxembourg

Actually, it might seem that way, but if you look closely at a lot of these stories, the evidence isn’t really there. There are vast stretches of tundra and desert that we have yet to colonize, not to mention several thousands of leagues under the sea. The problem is that such ambitious grand scale projects bring to mind the ideals of utopian science fiction, but I see no reason why they can’t be translated into a cyberpunk world.

An escaped convict from should be able to park a cheap submarine in a cave at the bottom of the Pacific ocean, just to hide out for few months. I can also imagine large mining communities in the arctic circle, digging through rock and ice for the last remaining precious metals. I’m even writing a story which explores the terrain of the Sahara Desert. So I think there are a still a few places that cyberpunk hasn’t explored, we just need the creativity to find them.

http://www.cyberpunked.org/cyberpunk/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UekzJclnpM8

there ya go wire heads.

it would give cyperpunks some interesting dogma.

kurzweil had a great book on spirituality and machines, how AI would see god. that’d be the best place to start.

hell yeah, cyber-stigmata.

I suspect advanced technologies don’t make it down to the poor because the money is concentrated at the top. So the corporations market and sell to the elites who have the money.

My hunch would be that there’s a tipping point; if megacorporations or governments abuse their power too much, the above will come into effect sooner or later. So Rampant Coyote’s idea of having an uneasy alliance between megacorporations and governments seems more sensible than the older cyberpunk ideas of corporations running the world all on their own. I would, however, add the people as a third party in that uneasy alliance.

The upshot is, though, that some relatively minor problems aside, most people will enjoy “just enough” wealth and comfort, or there’d be an uprising. That takes away a lot of the cyberpunk themes right there.

So the only alternative I see is that somehow this ease of communications is strongly curtailed. I’m not sure how that would happen, other than through some form of catastrophe that distracts people enough for some group to seize power over it. At which point you can go with all the other cyberpunk things again…

1. Ubiquitous computing & communication. RFID on steroids. When computing costs mere pennies and can provide so much feedback, makers of everything from shoes to cigarettes will be installing millicomputers on everything. Think of how, for example, Facebook games are gathering metrics on just about every click, every action you make in the games. Now imagine companies doing the same thing with real life.

2. Likewise – as privacy is rapidly becoming a thing of the past in our real world, put that on fast-forward. All that data collecting taking place among thousands and thousands of companies and government agencies makes it possible – if extremely difficult – to get very exact information about anyone in the world who doesn’t take great pains to stay off the grid. So while that can of Diet Coke you bought this afternoon may not know exactly who bought it, it knows exactly where you bought it down to the GPS coordinates, how much you paid for it, what the temperature was when you bought it, how quickly you drank it, and maybe even your approximate body mass index. Somewhere out there, someone else has information about where your credit card was used to buy the drink. Someone else has imagery from one five thousand tiny personal, company-owned, and government-run cameras that were active in a four-block radius that probably caught pictures of you. The information is all out there – it’s just expensive to hire someone to pull all those needles out of the haystacks.

3. Hey, maybe all that radiation going from all these communication devices is making sterility a real problem. Being able to afford to have a child takes on a whole new meaning, as the chance of having children naturally as opposed to test-tube babies is increasingly rare.

4. A lot of the genre fiction of the past theorized a world where the corporations took over, with major world governments of the era being reduced to basically ineffective third-world powers still trying to be relevant. I think what we’ve seen more of in the West over the course of the last 20-30 years is more of a case of western democracies cozying up more and more with big money — corporations, labor unions, and other special interests. So rather than having a future where the government has been steamrollered by private interests, a more modernized cyberpunk society would illustrate more of an uneasy alliance where regulation and oversight by the government is merely polite fiction, but really the only thing keeping a giant conglomeration’s power in check is the competing factions within.

What it’s still got is the presentation of the physical world and the human mind as completely hackable, in the jargon file sense rather than in the popular sense. What differs is mostly the type of technology used to perform that hacking; it’s closer to how we might imagine the next evolution of technical marvels to be, rather than how they were imagined back in the 80s or even before.

Yes, it’s utterly cyberpunk from my point of view. But I also understand it to be very different from other cyberpunk works out there.

I guess now we should argue if The Diamond Age is really cyberpunk. :)

An alternative of the “replication machine” is Transmetropolitan, where the machines require input. Some people will go hunt garbage to feed into their “makers”, but the stories imply that this produces lower quality replications than having a store-bought block to work with. So, even with a bit of high technology, there are some drawbacks.

anarchotoads wrote:
DIY, I think, is a major part of the cyberpunk ethic.

I’ll agree here. Hard to imagine someone living the “low life” if they can just order up whatever their hearts desire at the moment.

Stephenson probably realized that if everyone had unlimited access to this tech, a cyberpunk/dystopian setting would be hard to realize, so he limited availability by claimung some groups of people preferred not to use it (more or less).

I’d think that in the same way that SF authors invent ways for traveling between distant stars quickly in order to make their stories work, in cyberpunk you’ll find authors inventing restrictions to tech availability.

I recall in a pen&paper world where I wanted to mix magic and high tech a little, but keep control over how much it mixed, I used a non-uniform field of magical energy as an excuse that granted mana, but made technology of a given complexity simply not work. Cheap, but works.