Adventurers Again
I’ve always been intrigued by story-telling in video games, especially in MMOs. The MMO genre, with its perpetual nature, has amazing potential to create unique and open-ended narrative experiences. But with all the evolutions and improvements the MMORPG genre has enjoyed over the last few decades, when we sit down to play, do we feel more like adventurers, or less?
How do we get back to those roots? Is it possible to design a world, quests and characters that create the opportunity for players to make genuine discoveries? Where those discoveries have social impact, and you find yourself returning to this world because you long to explore? I truly believe this is possible, and we hope to achieve it through the Perception system.
The common trend in MMOs is to deliver story and quest content to players in a highly linear and directive way. This familiar format generally goes something like: travel to a new area, find the NPC hub where quests are dispensed and gather them all, follow your minimap to various quest objectives and do as many as possible in one run before returning back for the grand turn-in. Continue until you are directed to the next hub, rinse and repeat. This rhythm is often the best way to progress and gear up on your way to max level.
But this approach has changed us. Over the years, the grand worlds we inhabit as players have become less things to be explored and more of a curated conveyor belt of content. The world, narrative, and characters serve only as a quiet backdrop while our minimap hurries us along the progression line. And if the points of progression are already determined and revealed to us, what are we actually discovering? This is exactly what we’re endeavoring to change.
Go Forth and Explore
In Pantheon, your actions, conversations and curiosity matter. We won’t be handholding you. In fact, we are quite comfortable with players missing out on something because they didn’t bother to look hard enough. Didn’t consider talking to the cook’s assistant humbly working away near a stove in Demith? Maybe that’s one of the decisions that led to your friend being offered a quest to hunt the traitorous wind nomad in Silent Plains! Every chest you open, enemy you slay, conversation you have, dialogue you choose and location you visit may play a role in shaping your unique adventure through Terminus.
The upcoming Smoldering Trenches and Ashbreather Enclave will be an opportunity to experience the powerful Perception system at work.
So now, go forth and explore, Adventurers!
Implementing Perception in Pantheon
Have you ever had a moment in a game where you discovered something that you weren’t expecting? Maybe it was a secret area, or a tidbit of lore, or potentially even a hidden encounter, but if you’re like me, it probably caused you to spend hours and hours looking for more of those things, just to try and find what you might have been missing up until that point.
Over the years we have talked a lot about the Perception system in our game – and for good reason. There is a lot to it. Under the hood, Perception is a system of character flags, checks, and triggers that let us make things happen in response to what you’ve done or discovered in the game, or even what you have not done or discovered. However, what it lets us do is much more interesting.
- With perception, we can give you discoveries to find in the world – some easy, some hard. Hidden treasure, obscure quests, even secret encounters with powerful foes.
- With perception, we can allow things to happen in response to your presence and your actions. Perhaps you’re investigating a theft for the local merchant’s guild, and someone ambushes you to try and stop your efforts. Or maybe you’ve found an item in the world, and NPCs interact with you differently because you’ve found that item.
- Perception also allows us to bring the lore and secrets of the world to life so that you can explore them organically. What starts off as simply fighting the local bandits might cause you to stumble into clues about an ancient mystery or an insidious plot.
The best thing about the perception system is that it gives us room to help make each character’s journey through the game more unique to them. One of the problems that has plagued MMOs since their inception is the challenge of how you scale your content to thousands of players who are experiencing the world side-by-side. As gamers, we talk a lot about “firsts”, because once something is known, it often ends up fully described in a video walkthrough somewhere or on a website somewhere, and that sense of discovery can rapidly be lost as a result. Perception helps us swing that pendulum back to a place where one character’s journey might be significantly different from another’s, and that sense of discovery still exists for players who come into the game later.
Implementing Perception
As mentioned above, Perception in our game is ultimately powered by a system of character flags and triggers that allow us to set up decision flows within the game. Did you find that quest and did you finish it, or is it still running? Did you kill that NPC? Do you have that item? Did you loot the treasure box in the ruins, or did you miss it? Have you visited that area of the world? The system allows us to make decisions based on any of these parameters, either alone or in combination. It’s very powerful, but it also makes using it quite a bit more involved than setting up a simple quest.
For our upcoming Ashbreathers content release, much of the work we have been doing with Perception is expanding that system of flags and triggers to cover the different scenarios that we need to support. For example, we’ve added functionality that allows us to check the status of individual quest objectives, rather than just the overall quest itself. We’ve also added functionality that lets us detect whether specific NPCs are spawned in an area or not. These are just two examples – there are many more. Most of our Perception development time has gone into these types of things, so that we can use the system to start making the game more dynamic and responsive to our players.
Perception in our Upcoming Content
What might be more interesting is how we’re using it.
The Ashbreathers Enclave and the Smoldering Trenches have some significant lore and backstory associated with them. These areas were directly impacted by the events of the past and are connected to things happening elsewhere in Terminus as well. Lore like this is much more fun when you discover it though, rather than having it told to you. To achieve that, many of our quests in the area, as well as some other things, use the Perception system.
Before anyone panics, I am not going to spoil these quests in this blog post. But suffice to say that as you adventure through the area, you may stumble across various discoveries that lead to something greater. Answers that lead to more questions, and places that you visited before that now have greater meaning, or that you may want to revisit.
For the process of creating these quests and events, most of the credit must go to Roenick and Istuulamae, who created the NPC dialogue and outlined the lore, secrets, and plots that are in motion in the area. With help from several others on the team, I then worked to place these into the game in a way that allows you to experience them, rather than simply follow them. That is not only reflected in quests that you might discover and unlock, but also in the names of things and places, in the visual models that they use, in the flavor text you see on items, and of course in the events that may occur as you adventure through the area.
When the area first arrives on June 11, you will be able to experience this content for yourself. I personally can’t wait to see you all talking about the discoveries you make in the area. While there will be a fair amount of content available for you on the 11th, more is coming, and we plan to do an update in a few weeks that brings you the final, epic conclusion of one of the main storylines, as well as additional quests and events in the area.
Ultimately, we want this place to feel like a very rich experience where it might take you many trips to fully uncover all its mysteries. And as we move forward into other areas of content big or small, we’ll be taking these new tools and leveraging them there as well.