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(A blog focusing on the development and design of Norwegian Wood, a privately run Ultima Online-shard - with focus on design-theories, discussing pros and cons of individual features, status-reports from the development process and other tidbits that people might find interesting.)
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Presenting Character Names
It's a given fact that characters in MMORPGs are mainly identified by their names. Other means of identification, such as for instance the character appearances and what they are wearing, aren't reliable enough to be used as the main method for recognizing other players. True, it's possible to build a game with very intricate and detailed faces, body sizes etc - but there's only a limited amount of resources available for designing features like these, and usually actual gameplay features take precedence. In our own case we can't even consider this, as we're restricted by what the UO client can/cannot do (it can't do very intricate and detailed faces, varied body sizes etc).
So we've got to use character names for identification. The question though, is how to present these character names to the players.
The standard way to do this in most UO shards (including the official ones) is to simply display the true name of any given character above that character's head whenever someone uses the AllNames macro, single-clicks the character or "comes into range" (if that feature is enabled in their client). And in the character's paperdoll, of course. We've already
decided to forgo the "names floating above the head"-approach, and will disable such presenting of names for both AllNames and Single-clicking on characters, but we still have to find out what to do about names in paperdolls (and elsewhere - such as in trade windows, not to mention guilds).
So why do it differently from standard UO? Well, for one there's the idea of characters having to "introduce" themselves to each other instead of knowing by default the names of everyone they meet. It is a bit strange that Bob the Newbie knows the names of every single character he encounters in the world, and stranger still if he starts talking to them and adresses them by their names - which he technically shouldn't know until he has been introduced to said character. This breaks immersion and annoys some people, while others still don't have a problem with it. One way of doing this is to keep a log for each character which lists all characters he/she has met(read: been introduced to), which the server can then check up against to see whether or not one knows the name of a specific character. Unless the list contains the character's ID/Name, his name would come up as something generic such as "a human" or perhaps simply "Unknown".
A more advanced method (with a higher number of potential problems attached) is to let each character have "localized" names for all characters he/she meets. I.e. They, or the characters who they're introduced to, get to choose which name will be saved in their "known names"-list. This would allow a character to go under one name in one part of the world, and a different name in another part of the world. In the "underworld" a character could, for instance, be known as "Rascal" while being known as "Jack Smith" to everyone else. On the negative side(or is it?) it would also mean that a character could be known to someone as "Blargh" or "AnnoyingD00d" or "idiot", or simply a different name to everyone. This can create a good deal of confusion if two characters who know the same character under different names start talking about said character. And there's other problems - like what's the use of reporting a criminal to the guards if you're the only character in the world who knows said criminal under the name "Charlie", or if the criminal is known to no-one at all - an anonymous character so to speak?
We're making up our own thoughts about all of this, of course - but we're also interested in hearing if any of you have anything to contribute with. Any ideas, thoughts, comments on the above mentioned issues/solutions? Post your feedback here!
So we've got to use character names for identification. The question though, is how to present these character names to the players.
The standard way to do this in most UO shards (including the official ones) is to simply display the true name of any given character above that character's head whenever someone uses the AllNames macro, single-clicks the character or "comes into range" (if that feature is enabled in their client). And in the character's paperdoll, of course. We've already decided to forgo the "names floating above the head"-approach, and will disable such presenting of names for both AllNames and Single-clicking on characters, but we still have to find out what to do about names in paperdolls (and elsewhere - such as in trade windows, not to mention guilds).
So why do it differently from standard UO? Well, for one there's the idea of characters having to "introduce" themselves to each other instead of knowing by default the names of everyone they meet. It is a bit strange that Bob the Newbie knows the names of every single character he encounters in the world, and stranger still if he starts talking to them and adresses them by their names - which he technically shouldn't know until he has been introduced to said character. This breaks immersion and annoys some people, while others still don't have a problem with it. One way of doing this is to keep a log for each character which lists all characters he/she has met(read: been introduced to), which the server can then check up against to see whether or not one knows the name of a specific character. Unless the list contains the character's ID/Name, his name would come up as something generic such as "a human" or perhaps simply "Unknown".
A more advanced method (with a higher number of potential problems attached) is to let each character have "localized" names for all characters he/she meets. I.e. They, or the characters who they're introduced to, get to choose which name will be saved in their "known names"-list. This would allow a character to go under one name in one part of the world, and a different name in another part of the world. In the "underworld" a character could, for instance, be known as "Rascal" while being known as "Jack Smith" to everyone else. On the negative side(or is it?) it would also mean that a character could be known to someone as "Blargh" or "AnnoyingD00d" or "idiot", or simply a different name to everyone. This can create a good deal of confusion if two characters who know the same character under different names start talking about said character. And there's other problems - like what's the use of reporting a criminal to the guards if you're the only character in the world who knows said criminal under the name "Charlie", or if the criminal is known to no-one at all - an anonymous character so to speak?
We're making up our own thoughts about all of this, of course - but we're also interested in hearing if any of you have anything to contribute with. Any ideas, thoughts, comments on the above mentioned issues/solutions? Post your feedback here!
