Developer Chat: Volume 4

Creature Creation in the World of Ultima Online
By - Tom "Augur" Ivey

In just about every fantasy role-playing game since the dawn of time, one of the primary centerpieces of excitement in the gameplay is combat with dark and deadly creatures. For this reason, the greatest challenge in designing interesting and engaging combat systems lies in coming up with a variety of gruesome beasts for the player to hunt down and vanquish. No matter how unique and appealing the combat system is, if a player finds himself fighting the same standard group of creatures over and over again -- well, after the thousandth time they'll be screaming and clawing for something drastically different from the standard fair that will test their skills in a new and distinctive way.

As a designer on a massively multiplayer game, once you have a solid base game from which to work, you'll find you're in the position where there is a constant need for an ongoing stream of unique and engaging new content. Variety is the spice of life when it comes to creature design, but splashing an old monster with a new coat of paint, or resizing and adding a prefix to its name won't satisfy the players' craving for new monster killing opportunities. Even if your creatures have miraculously dissimilar models and textures, if the only significant difference between them is that one swings faster and has more hit points and the other has a high armor class and hits harder, you're missing the chance to truly captivate your player base. As combat with non-player creatures is a highly valued feature that is most likely a core system in your overall project design, it's vitally important that you take the opportunity to set yourself apart from the competition.

After all, a large segment of most players' game experience in the current massively multiplayer games revolves around monster bashing. If your players continually encounter monsters that at a base level feel like the "same old thing", you shouldn't be surprised when players start to become bored and restless (the bane of any game!)

Even worse, if the experience of fighting monsters begins to feel redundant and boring, it will cause your players to begin to feel the same way about your combat system. Even if I have fifty different amazingly cool ways to attack a creature, with stunning sound effects and sparkling particle systems galore, if all those encounters feel blasé to me because the creatures all react to those attacks in the same way -- well, then it begins to seem pretty useless to have worked up my character to attain all those special moves in the first place.

Now that Ultima Online has a solid base from which to work, our goal is to avoid the pitfalls listed above by adhering to a few core principles whenever we have a chance to add a new creature to the game. These principles are focused on the overriding premise of always offering players new and challenging experiences when they come into the game regardless of what style of gameplay they prefer. In this case, we are specifically gearing that effort towards ensuring new and exciting creature combat experiences.

The three main categories of creature design that we use as a guideline when creating new creature content for Ultima Online could best be described as "setup," "stats," and "specials."

Setup

The basis for any new monster addition lies in creating an original (even novel) creature concept: the "setup." This is the first chance to ensure that you create an interesting, engaging, and exciting creature addition. The "setup" for a creature will later help define the artists' realization of the creature in model form, as well as help with concepts for the specific statistics, artificial intelligence, and unique abilities of the creature.

When creating a new, fearsome beast for Ultima Online, we generally start by asking a few basic questions. First, what sort of gaps do we have in our creature base right now? Are we missing any "category" of creature, or a general creature concept that would fit well within the overall framework of Ultima Online's back story and history, but add a unique new twist? From there, we get into the specifics of the creature as a unique individual, race, or "type" within the game.

What does the creature look like? Where does it come from? How does it move? Is it intelligent or animal-like? Is it stealthy or does it rely on brute force? Is it magical or mundane? There are a thousand questions here that you should ask yourself, as each question only adds depth to the overall concept, helping to shape a more interesting creature in terms of art and conceptual design. Additionally, asking detailed questions about a creature's general look, behavior, and character assists in the brainstorming process when creating interesting new powers, tactics, and AI for a creature.

In answering the question, "does this Shambling plant beast look like a mound of fungi and mold, or like a jungle tree, with long vines and withered limbs?" you might come up with an idea for a Noxious Spore Cloud attack that causes confusing images on the player's screen, or a paralyzing Vine Whip attack that the creature uses to slowly pull players into its gaping maw.

Statistics

Now that you have a general concept and look for your new creature, you'll need to come up with the statistics that will provide a basis for the creature's combat interactions. Each game relies upon different statistics to describe players' and creatures' abilities, but they all share one thing in common -- statistics are a way of defining a creature's basic power level within the game world.

Statistics are generally core numbers that the game uses as a basis for tracking or managing combat interactions -- while a change in statistics usually won't be enough to separate your creature from all the others, it does act as a starting point from which a creature can then be further differentiated in terms of its powers and behavior.

If you're looking to create a stealthy, vicious panther-like creature in the game, giving him thousands of hit points, a ludicrously low dexterity, and a resistance to magic doesn't really help define the concept. Statistics should make sense for the type of creature you're looking to create (both fictionally and in terms of gameplay), as well as the powers and abilities he'll have as a finished monster. Statistics work hand in hand with descriptive background, art, and monster AI to form a distinctive personality and tactical setup (in terms of game mechanics) for how players will interact with your fabulous new creature.

Specials

Now that you've formed a solid base for your creature concept, it's time to work on its unique abilities and artificial intelligence. This is a designer's chance to really shine -- to create a creature that acts and "feels" different to even the most veteran players. In Ultima Online we're lucky enough to have a fairly wide range of "triggers" and "events" that creature code can use to react to the world in diverse and distinctive ways.

When designing a creature's AI, we're mainly concerned with its special abilities; ways in which the creature behaves outside of the basic combat code that all creatures obey (that is, targeting a player, swinging at various intervals, dealing physical damage, retreating at low hit points, etc.) Special abilities come in many forms. There are new attack styles, unique forms of movement, one-time special effects, unique defenses, and reactions to different forms of attacks (from melee to long range), just to name a few. Special abilities and artificial intelligence help define a monster's tactical style.

The goal of a designer when creating a monster's special abilities is to present a player with new situations that they must react to and overcome in order to succeed. This means thinking outside the box. Increasing a monster's hit points to allow it to take more damage from a player's attacks does not present the player with a truly unique form of interaction. Let's face it, all monsters must be hit for damage in order to kill them -- just because yours takes more hits to kill, that doesn't make it feel unique.

Instead, we must attempt to create new interactions between players and monsters each time we add content to the game. This involves adapting pure game interactions (using skills, abilities, or equipment) as well as player skill and thought (posturing, maneuvering, and decision-making).

All the while, these special abilities should fit into the concept of the creature as a whole. When a player encounters a creature and sees one of its special attacks, the player should see it as a natural extension of the monster's physical look and behaviors. A kitten that shoots fireballs not only seems bizarre, but it provides an encounter that feels cheap or "cheated." Alternately, if a player encounters a roiling pile of gooey, amorphous flesh that continually seems to change shape, it would seem fitting that such a creature might have a special ability that allows it to mimic the player's look and abilities in response to an attack.

Final Thoughts

With Ultima Online well into its fourth year, we are constantly faced with the challenge of providing new and creative content to keep the game as appealing as it was on its first day of release.

New creatures will always be a critical part of providing thrills and excitement for a game's core player-base. By creating imaginative new creature designs that introduce unique and challenging combat interactions, while still adhering to sound design philosophies, we can provide an ever-changing landscape of engaging adventures within the world of Ultima Online for many years to come.

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