Mar

22

1001 Crazy Game Design Ideas: #3 A Mob by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet

March 22, 2007 | 2 Comments

From across the plains you can see them floating weightlessly in the air, bobbing gently with the movements of your quarry, the impalpable letters of your prey’s name.

Good thing the developers have let me know that it’s a Greater Osterampusaur that I was about to trip over because lord knows I would have hated to accidentally call it, “some weird lizard thing that attacked me.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I think it might be neat if the developers left it up to their communities to come up with names for the monsters in the world. Different communities or different players might call the monsters different things adding another level of mystery, discovery and also player ownership to the game. It seems to me that whole groups of players from the various servers would collaborate to come up with a comprehensive naming system. Discoverers might want to name things after themselves. I’m sure some of the discussions over the names would become quite heated. What fun!

Sure, it adds an extra wrinkle when writing Lore and assigning quests, it could complicate the “consider” system most games have in place, but shouldn’t present any major problems which couldn’t be overcome with a little planning.

noobinator A developer might call this a “Crocursiniphant,” but what might you call it if it didn’t have a little tag floating over it’s head?
(Besides a pretty crappy looking creature, that is)

I think I’ll call it a noobinator.


 

 

Comments

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Speak your mind

2 Comments so far

  1. Gravatar Ryan Shwayder on March 24, 2007 12:19 pm

    I’d call it a platygator. I’d be for it if I could come up with a great way to make quests that wasn’t confusing or frustrating (such as having to name a creature before you can get a quest that involves that creature).

    If we could get away with Deus Ex style quests in MMOs, that would be a different story. For example, a quest could be called “Rescue the Princess from the Castle Dungeon.” We give a nice climbable wall, destructible door, and underground entrance at step one, as well as various choices for players as they progress toward the goal. They encounter creatures and NPCs along the way, but we never tell them that they will in the quest.

    That would be all well and good, but making a quest like that would make players assume we were incredibly lazy designers, and most wouldn’t even look for the alternate methods to solve the quest (and would instead go to their favorite quest database so they didn’t have to think for themselves).

    Ah, the wonderful freedoms and complexities that the genre has ruined for itself.

  2. Gravatar noob on March 25, 2007 2:55 pm

    I’m not sure I completely understand what you are saying, which I attribute to the fact that I am just shooting from the hip typically.

    Many of these ideas I scribble here may not make a whole lot of sense in a vacuum, or as a bolt-on to a current system, but I kind of envision instead as a small piece of a sympathetic framework.

    If no mobs had their names prominently displayed above their heads announcing their designation to the world, it certainly wouldn’t mean that no one has named them, it just means that players have to figure out what is what, or come up with names of their own if they don’t know exactly what the “what” is.

    For example, a town may be ravaged by local orcs and the townspeople may call them “orcs” (or possibly goblins, or imps, or green-skins) and when a player goes out looking, he/she will probably have a good idea of what an orc is. Maybe the player will be able to tell which orcs are orc fighters or orc priests by their appearance, but that’s something the player will be responsible for noticing, not spelled out for them.

    In another example, a town may be ravaged by a mysterious huge basket-making creature. And while descriptions are sketchy, with some asking around, the players can determine the unspeakable monster has a stick of celery for a hand and Patrick Duffy for a leg. The townspeople may all have a different name for it, but piecing the descriptions given by each person interviewed will eventually lead them to the right creature to kill.

    As a last example, the player may be deep in a dungeon in a corner not on the map handed to him/her by the local retired adventurer, but off in the blank area that simply says “here be monsters.” When the player comes across a brown thing that looks like a cross between a pile of moldy stuffing and a tangle of razor wire with eyes and teeth, coming up for a name of the beastie just for the sake of reference is up to whoever is looking at it right then trying to describe it to their group and/or guildies.

    What it will eventually become known as in the player community is up to whoever pitches their idea the best.

    From a quest making standpoint, it can make things abit more problematic. The developer would no longer be able to simply say: kill 10 dungeon creepers and retrieve their gizzards. Instead they might need to reword it in a different way: get the gizzards from 10 creatures which feed on the ancient bones in the crypt.

Search