Developer Chat: Volume 2

New Player Experience
By - Tom "Evocare" Chilton

One of the most significant challenges facing Ultima Online since its release has been the new player experience. Initially, the vast majority of new players were hardcore gamers with enough game playing experience to have developed good instincts which enabled them to make the right choices within the relatively unscripted new player journey into the game. However, as the audience for massively-multiplayer online role-playing games has expanded outside the hardcore gamer segment, the new player experience has become much more of a stumbling block for the less experienced gamer entering this genre.

As Ultima Online becomes increasingly popular within the casual gamer and PC gamer segments, our greatest challenge lies in keeping these new entrants enchanted enough throughout their new player experience to continue playing the game beyond the initial stages, thus increasing the likelihood that they become thriving members of our community.

In order to gain insight into the new player's challenges, we focused our exit survey research on why players left. Specifically, we focused on those players leaving early within the first month of play. We quickly realized that we were losing most of our new players within the first three play sessions due to a lack of clearly defined goals upon entry.

There were too many choices to make without enough information on which to base decisions and a lack of early "wins" to keep them motivated to continue exploring the world. All of this was driven by the player's inability to move through the world by successfully navigating our user-interface. Therefore, our ability to attract and retain new players was clearly hinged on our ability to make it easy and fun for players to enter the game, navigate through the world and score some "goodies." And, this had to occur within the first three visits -- or else!

When we began to dissect our new player experience and view it as a series of basic steps and experiences, we quickly identified several elements ripe for enhancement. The approach of dropping players into the world and expecting them to know how to (or want to) immediately create their own entertaining experiences within the game world simply did not work for the majority of new players. However, the issue becomes more complex in light of the fact that games such as Ultima Online are geared to provide a multitude of different ways to play the game -- all of which are determined by the player. This is what creates the open-ended style of play and ultimately provides the depth of the game allowing for the long-term lifecycle of these games.

The challenge, then, was to create more of a single-player game driven experience that would be more fun and comfortable to the new player. We opted for a solution that eases the transition between the single-player mindset and the massively-multiplayer mindset by creating a highly directed experience that starts when players first enter the game world. This is accomplished using tangible quests and goals much like you'd find in a single-player RPG and progressively evolves into a more broad and open-ended set of options. This "directed" experience incorporates adventure, early "wins" and rewards along the way and ensures that, above all, those first few sessions are fun and create the desire to continue further into the game!

Another issue to be addressed was the need to make Ultima Online easier to play by simplifying the user-interface and providing useful in-game help for common points of confusion. Originally, UO's interface was geared toward immersing the player in the game world as thoroughly as possible. In and of itself, immersion is certainly a desirable component. Unfortunately, its side effects included a number of interfaces that proved unintuitive for the casual gamer.

Among these was the "speech trigger" interface, whereby players can trigger game events by saying the right things under the right circumstances to then initiate specific results or events to occur. For example, a player could approach a banker non-player character (NPC) and upon saying the word "bank" their bank box (private secure storage area that every character has in-game) would open. Although no single instance of a speech trigger posed a significant problem, the sheer volume of speech triggers that a player was required to know added significantly to the overall learning curve of the new player.

In order to solve this problem, we have introduced user-intuitive menus, not unlike the drop-down type menus found in many software programs popular today. Anytime a player clicks on an object, these menus list each option available to the player via the object or character on which they have clicked (any NPC, player or dynamic item). As a result, the player need only remember how to click on an object in order to find out how to interact with it. This allows players to get immersed in the "game" experience and not focus on learning game mechanics.

In addition to the measures taken above, we wanted to ensure that the entire new player experience was as fun as we could make it from the moment the player enters the world. So, through a combination of focus groups, surveys and informal discussions with new and veteran players along with our own observations we realized that the more traditional type of tutorial, which we had integrated into our Renaissance version of the game, was not engaging and did not give players a compelling taste of what the game had to offer. It failed to draw players in and excite them enough to become a part of the experience that is Ultima Online. It also did not integrate players with other live players, which comprises much of the fun of a massively-multiplayer game world.

In order to enhance the new player training with the intrigue and excitement of the world itself, we completely eliminated the old tutorial and replaced it with a new player quest intended to introduce players to our beautiful fantasy world, its inhabitants and adventures while teaching them how to function in that world. This learning component is completely embedded within the fun and challenge of the activities themselves and the drive to meet the next new goal.

In addition, we're integrating some of the exciting new monsters concepted by Todd McFarlane into the experience in order to create a link between the fiction our new players experience and the fictional scenarios our veterans are participating in at any given point in time. Hopefully, these measures will culminate in a greatly improved play experience for our new players and veterans alike. Hopefully, it also creates for our new players the level of excitement from the very start that characterizes Ultima Online throughout and is so much a part of our long-term success.

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