• DigitalFlux
• June 2, 2010    12:02 AM

Our last blog talked about fixing the MMO genre from the ground up, and skimmed over several points which we think can help bring about a more in-depth experience. There’s a term for the level of interactivity that a game has:

Interactive Fidelity (iFi)

Interactive Fidelity means the same thing to game interaction as High Fidelity means to sound: It’s all about quality. The more iFi your game has, the more you are able to do in the game. Super Mario Bros? Not much Interactive Fidelity (all you can do is run, jump, and throw fireballs to interact with the world). Grand Theft Auto? Significantly more Interactive Fidelity available there.

Some MMOs provide for books that can be read within the game. At least one provides lore within the books found laying open on tables in castles, and others provide the books only by purchasing them through a vendor. These are good ways to improve Interactive Fidelity. In Epic Frontiers, information plays a crucial role in some missions, and to that end, while books and scraps of readable information can be found throughout the world, there are some specific structures we’ve created specifically to hold information that players may need. We call it a library…

Libraries will play critical roles in missions where information needs to be found and delivered to NPCs (or even to other characters). This follows what we wrote about in our last blog about the Action System- even information is an object, and why let an opportunity pass where you can play with information in the game! And that leads us to not only being able to read the information in the books, but to be able to “log” that information, and pass it along to, say, an NPC who is waiting for that information in order to make a decision about something.

Let’s say that NPC is a Charkritian Magistrate who is considering whether to imprison or free someone accused of theft. The Magistrate knows that his information is limited, and needs a specific piece of information from another NPC in order to make a decision. That NPC, however, if afraid to talk, for some reason. Using the conversation system, you engage the NPC in small-talk and gain his trust, at which point you then ask about the theft. To your surprise (or not), the NPC tells you that it was someone else that committed the crime. Being the good Charkritian citizen that you are, you log that information from the conversation and bring it to the Magristrate, who promptly releases the innocent man and sends the law after the true thief. Yay! Information has saved the day!

Another way that we’ve tried to push the level of iFi to new heights is with Skill Linking. While going over scenarios we wanted to represent, we came upon several that vexed us- most MMOs don’t have a good mechanism for teamwork. In a scenario where five party members come upon a boulder blocking an entrance which requires a strength level of 150 to move it, and where the party members’ skill levels for strength are 30, 20, 50, 40, and 35, the situation becomes one of typing “LFG STR LVL 150!” into the zone channel window instead of surmounting the problem. Within the context of the gameworld, the characters should be able to move that boulder if they just pooled their strength and all pushed on it at once.

And that is how Skill Linking was born. The first player approaches the boulder and tries to move it, getting a failure notification. Undeterred, the player then clicks on the Link Skills button, and selects the skill that they want help with. An icon appears to nearby players stating “<Character Name> asks for help using <Skill Name>!”. Once players approach the one needing help, they get presented with a dialog asking if they want to link their skills and help. For this scenario, it means that the five characters pool their strength and move the boulder- and they each have their skill levels for strength automatically incremented, just like any other skill they use.

It’s a simple game mechanic that is allowing Epic Frontiers to bring teamwork to a number of otherwise solo-style skills. Some magic skills will require Skill Linking in order to work, and sometimes, your crafting skills aren’t up to snuff and you need someone to help you craft them special brownies that help you recover your endurance faster (we’re making no judgments about what you’ve put in those things- as a matter of fact, we simply don’t want to know). And going further down the road is using Skill Linking for combat- and while I would tip our hand here, I’ll have to digress by saying that we have some interesting ideas for that as well.

Interactive Fidelity is a mouthful as a term- even in it’s “iFi” form, but the gameplay mechanics that it represents promises a much better experience for you gamers out there!

Next week’s blog will feature the AI that we’re putting into the NPCs- and the gameworld itself. Stay tuned!

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