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5 Tips for Writing Great Design Docs

9/29/2012

5 Tips for Writing Great Game Design Documents by Ray Mazza

When I first started writing design docs over seven years ago, they were disorganized, littered with weak language, and crammed with blocks of text so impenetrable to the discerning eye that they might have actually shielded a ring-wearing Frodo from Sauron’s gaze.

Compare this bird’s-eye view of a page from one of my first designs with a page from a design I wrote four years later:

(Design Doc, Circa 2005)

(Better Design Doc, Circa 2009)

Who sees the page on the left and doesn’t wince? It’s almost as friendly as a tome of tax codes. The page on the right, on the other hand, is inviting – it’s colorful, organized, and appropriately sparse.

The first problem any designer must overcome is getting their team to want to read a design. The second problem is presenting the information in a useful format for implementation. In this article, I’m going to share five tips I’ve learned that led to my current design doc style – a style which I’ve considered a success ever since developers who have moved onto other projects told me they missed this format.

1. Always Start with Design Goals

If you’re designing a feature, your developers need to know what its purpose is. It’s context for the rest of the design, and not only informs the developers how to read each aspect, but also helps them provide better suggestions for improvements.

More importantly, the goals are for you, the designer. Writing 3-5 goals forces you to get to the heart of a design’s importance. Once you’ve written them, you’ll think more clearly about each aspect of the feature, you’ll avoid unnecessary bloat, and you’ll be more creative when challenged to achieve those goals.

Here’s an example of goals for a Tomb Level-Scripting feature for The Sims 3 World Adventures:

Goals

Tomb Object Modularity. Traps, puzzles, doors, and rewards should interconnect with each other such that we can create countless combinations of interesting and challenging spaces.
Non-Linearity. Allow entry to many tombs without being on an official adventure so players can stumble upon gameplay while exploring the world.
Recognize and track progress. Surface the player’s progress through tombs and adventures in order to offer more goals and achievement-based motivation.

These goals are short, sweet, and they drilled to the core of what we felt was important for our tomb development system. Goals like this will set you up to craft a better design.

2. Use Strong Statements. Ditch all Mitigated Speech.

New designers tend to write design docs like they’re compiling a Christmas list to a stodgy Santa Claus:

“It would be great if we could get a seamless world with a huge playable area.”
“We might want to let players use the character creator to make NPCs for the town.”
“If possible, it would be cool to kick fallen enemies and have a chance of coins spilling out.”

Every time developers read lines like this in a design doc, they lose confidence in the designer, and usually file these parts of the design into their “we don’t have to do this” category.

Designers need to take a stand in their designs. Brainstorms and early design meetings are for discussing possibilities and uncertainties, but design documents are for telling the team exactly what the game will be. Even if the designer doesn’t entirely believe in what he’s writing.

All designers are filled with doubt about some of their designs. Will a HUD-less screen work? Will the engineers laugh at me because I want to pull 20,000 cooking recipes from an online database? Will animators refuse to animate a snake latching onto a character’s face and flailing about? Yes. They will! This is normal, and this is necessary. It’s part of the process, and it leads to great conversations that narrow in on what’s right and possible for your game.

So take a stand. Ditch all mitigating speech from your designs – no more maybe, possibly, could we, it would be cool if, etc. (Malcolm Gladwell writes, in Outliers, how mitigating language likely led to at least one plane crash when a cockpit engineer and first officer were too soft-spoken to the higher authority of the pilot, rather than speaking clearly in a dangerous situation.) In addition, be as specific as possible. Instead of “large,” say “25 square kilometers.” Here’s a rewrite of the design statements with strong and precise language:

“The world will be a seamless, 25 square kilometer playable space.”
“Players will be able to use the character creator to make NPCs for the town.”
“Players can kick fallen enemies to have a tunable chance of additional coins spilling out with value proportional to the enemy’s normal loot.”

Much better. This was one of my first and most important lessons as a designer, thanks to my boss and Creative Director at the time (Matt Brown, now of Blizzard).

3. Lots of Bulleted Lists!

Design documents are, effectively, lists of tasks. So why not present them that way? Damion Schubert says in his fantastic GDC 2007 presentation, How to Write Great Design Documents (a must-read for all designers), “Programmers almost always want a short bullet list (they kind of like checking things off lists).”

This is a bird’s-eye view of the entire design for The Sims 3 World Adventures tomb technology which allowed designers to script tombs by interlinking object behaviors of traps, triggers, and objects. Notice that the majority of the text appears after bullets:

The Sims 3 World Adventures Tomb Technology Design Doc Readability

A bird's eye view of The Sims 3 World Adventures "Tomb Technology" design doc.

And here’s a snippet pasted from the doc:

The Sims 3 World Adventures design document for Tomb Scripting Technology example of bullet point format

Each bullet is either a specific implementable task, or a header for a subset of specific implementable tasks. Write your designs like this, and they will be more readable and more actionable. And your engineers won’t hate you as much. (They may even begin to like you.)

Non-bulleted text is usually an overview, introductory text, or otherwise non-implementable.

Another benefit of bullets is that they naturally reduce vague language. It’s easy to hide uncertain statements within large blocks of text and not even know you’re doing it. But bullet points shift your mind into making strong, concrete statements.

4. Color Code for Disciplines and/or Readability

You may have noticed that I use plenty of color in my design docs. This was inspired by the great readability of gear hovertips in World of Warcraft (which had improved on a similar presentation in Diablo II). Take a look:

World of Warcraft item hovertips communicate much information through color

Even if you were illiterate, the coloring conventions would tell you that the Infernal Mittens were more rare (purple vs. blue), you could not equip either item (red text), that the Mittens had some unrealized bonuses (gray text), and that both items had additional bonuses (green) on top of normal stats.

Now, translate this to design docs. I use color for three things:

To draw attention to specific disciplines (art vs. animation vs. UI, etc).
To emphasize hierarchy (section headers & sub-headers).
To emphasize importance.

Here’s a fictitious example for an interaction between a Sim and a Piñata:

Key:
Green = Interaction
Orange = Animation
Purple = Important Object or Related Design (like Traits)
Pink = UI Requirement
Red = Visual Effects
Light Blue = Standalone Audio (not attached to animation)

You should adapt your color styles to the needs of your game and your team. Perhaps you need to call out a lot of text requirements, or your world builders will want to easily find aspects related to level design.

This may seem like a lot of effort, but it’s worth it. Suddenly, your key disciplines will find it much easier to absorb your designs and find the portions relevant to them. Want to know all the UI requirements in a 15-page design? Just look for the pink sections. I’ve had people move onto different teams, then tell me they miss this formatting and cannot do their jobs as easily.

The success of color in my design docs has spilled over into my style in these posts. I use bold color to emphasize important points and to create visual anchors, which also helps prevent readers from skipping blocks of text. I highly recommend reading Lazy Eyes (How we read online) by Michael Agger – an article that also deeply influenced my formatting style online and in design docs.

5. Use Images to Set Mood or Explain

This one is pretty simple: a picture is worth 1000 words in a design doc.

I like to use a picture at the top of every design document to set the mood and draw the reader in (and I do the same thing with almost all of the articles on my website). For example:

The Sims 3 Tomb Tech Design Doc Mood Image Example

Place a mood-setting image at the top of each design document.

And if a design point is vague with words alone, consider supplementing with an image:

The Sims 3 Painting Skill Design Image Example

An example from The Sims 3's design doc for Painting Skill.

In fact, if you have a complex design with many interwoven parts, a design document dominated by imagery can be preferable. For more about this, check out Stone Librande’s great One Page Designs presentation from GDC 2010:

Stone Librande's One Page Designs GDC 2007 Presentation

Summary

A lot goes into writing and formatting a great design document. This list is the best of what I’ve learned, but there are plenty of finer details. I highly recommend you follow the links to Damion Schubert’s presentation, Stone Librande’s presentation, and the Slate article Lazy Eyes (How we read online) for more advice and inspiration.

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3 Comments

SimCity Social & 8 Truths of Facebook Game Design:

7/23/2012

20 Comments

An Explanation of Facebook Games to the PC/Console Gamer in me of 2 Years Ago.

SimCity Social & 8 Truths of Facebook Game Design

Recently, we launched SimCity Social on Facebook, and I’m proud of it. After nearly 10 years in the industry developing hit PC titles for Maxis/EA (primarily The Sims games), why would I be so proud of a Facebook game? What has gotten into me?

Two years ago, before I worked on social games, I just didn’t “get” them. I didn’t want to bug my friends when I needed things. I didn’t want to play on the game’s schedule rather than my own. And I didn’t see any depth or interesting gameplay (and in many cases, there was none to see).

Like many PC/console gamers, I figured that if I didn’t like a Facebook game, then it was a bad game. But that was a subjective view. Now that I understand the types of people who enjoy Facebook games, I understand why many of these games are objectively great.

So I’m writing this post to explain to my past self why Facebook games are the way they are, and to dispel some of the misunderstandings that PC/console gamers have about them.

1. Strategy is Great, But it Needs to Cater to the Target Audience

One of my goals while working on SimCity Social was to bring more depth of gameplay to mass-market Facebook games. However, it would have been a mistake to try and shove all the complexity of a normal SimCity game into the Facebook variant because these games need to be easy to learn and quick to play.

Instead, I think SimCity Social hits the sweet spot – enough strategy that it tickles the mind, but not so much that it would scare away the mass market. Unfortunately, some reviews (like this one) don’t take the time to understand the game and instead dismiss it out of a general loathing for Facebook games, making comments like, “There was never a moment where I had to sit back and think about strategy.”

The main aspect of SimCity Social – city layout – is designed around giving players strategic choices. And it has given rise to many forum threads discussing placement strategy, with carefully crafted suggestions like this:

Strategy in SimCity Social: A player's suggestion for maximizing population.

(the white gaps are filled by roads)

Strategy in SimCity Social arises from a few rules and variables:

Homes (residential zones) hold population.
Attractions and décor increase population in nearby homes (radii and shape vary).
Attractions can be upgraded to increase radius of effect.
Homes get a population multiplier from being near coastline.
Businesses get a payout multiplier from near population.
Factories also get a payout multiplier from being near coastline (but they may produce pollution, which floats over nearby buildings, rendering them temporarily ineffective).

For example, here’s one player’s comparison of various locations for a business:

Placing businesses in higher population areas gives better payouts.

These rules, combined with an interesting terrain layout, make a complex system. There is no easily solvable optimal strategy, and strategy varies depending on your goals. The layout in the first image of this section may be great for high population, but it doesn’t account for coastline, businesses, industry, shape variations of attractions, or how the catalog of buildings evolves.

As our audience has grown, more players have whipped out spreadsheets and whiteboards to theorize optimal strategies, leading to Excel mockups that look like someone was diagraming CPU memory blocks:

One player’s theory of optimal placement for maximizing population.

In fact, some players are geeking out on the strategy so intensely that it’s what the entire game has become about for them. Not decoration. Not quests. Not collecting for the sake of progress. Not anything – except optimizing. Here’s one Excel mockup from a player who stepped back and tried to give equal attention to optimizing placement of all building types:

(A player-made Excel sheet representing their placement strategy and various bonuses conferred on and by businesses, attractions, décor, and homes.)

And all of this ties into the core loop, which focuses on affording better mechanisms to increase population.

Having a complex system that is part of the core loop and that has a simple, understandable interface can add a wonderful dimension to Facebook games and give players a feeling of consequence. More Facebook games need to evolve in this direction.

A “simple” interface limits the amount of complexity a game can have, but this simplicity is necessary to cater to the target audience – a mass market not typically composed of PC/console gamers.

(For more reading on depth, I recommend Smart-Depth: Adding More 'Game' to Social Games by Henric Suuronen.)

Which leads me to…

2. You Are Not the Audience: Half a Billion Other People Are.

Here’s a loose analogy. Compare playing Guitar Hero to actually playing a real guitar. Guitar Hero is more accessible, more immediately satisfying, and takes less of a time commitment. But playing the real guitar is more cerebral and, in the long run, more constructive.

Prince even turned down the opportunity to have his music in Guitar Hero, stating that it was “more important that kids learn how to actually play the guitar.”

Does this mean Guitar Hero is a bad experience? No. In fact, Guitar Hero makes the guitar accessible to an audience who does not have the time nor the initial desire to play the real guitar. It has made 25 million such people happy. And, in fact, it has given many of them a greater understanding of and appreciation for instruments, and led to 2/3 of non-instrumentalist players deciding they’d like to learn a real instrument.

Guitar Hero leads to greater appreciation for the real guitar.

Just the same, Facebook games target a wide audience that doesn’t have the time nor desire to play other games. People who were never interested in games before are suddenly seeing the appeal. And the same as Guitar Hero leads to a desire to learn the real guitar, Facebook games can also be a gateway to PC and console games. The light experience of The Sims Social has led to increased interest in The Sims PC games, and many SimCity Social players are expressing interest in trying the SimCity PC games.

On top of this, some Facebook games have had over 100 million players. Objectively, many Facebook games are great because they give so many people enjoyment. I never liked CastleVille much, but now I can appreciate it for what it is: a game that has made many tens of millions of players happy – more players than World of Warcraft ever had – and most of them never paid a cent.

3. Fast Load Times Mean Content is Spread Out Over Time

You can’t play a Facebook game and expect the amount of content to be on the same level as, say, Skyrim. The main challenge is load time. In a Facebook game, we don’t have the luxury of expecting players to sit through a long download with gigabytes of content.

We count our load times in seconds. If the game takes 30 seconds to load, that’s too long, and we’ll lose a lot of players before they even see the game the first time.

Facebook games must load in seconds, or players will leave.

However, successful Facebook games make up for this by releasing new content over time – usually every week or two – cycling new features and object in, and others out. The Sims Social has had thousands of game objects in its catalog over the past year, but only a portion of them are available at any given time. Facebook games really just get started when they launch.

4. Lots of Wall Posts Means More Players. But…

This is an aspect of Facebook games I’ve been conflicted on. When given permission, most Facebook games like to post to your wall or timeline. A lot. This is how they self-market to reach a wide audience. And, used correctly, it also helps share interesting moments from your game.

My designer heart tells me that Facebook games should only post the most interesting moments from gameplay, like when two players in The Sims Social "WooHoo" with each other – the sorts of moments that carry intrinsic value for your Facebook friends and are highly comment-worthy. This would make the overall player base happier. And Facebook agrees (in fact, they use this same example from The Sims Social).

A Sim couple about to “WooHoo.”

The Sims Social: Players get a chance to share that hey

Players get a chance to share this meaningful moment.

But the other side of the argument comes from the Product Managers – those in charge of the monetization and the virality of your game. Data shows that a certain high level output of posts leads to a wider audience. And a wider audience means we have a better chance of paying our dev costs. Period.

There’s no way to argue with that unless we can dredge up metrics that show that fewer viral mechanisms leads to better results in the long-term. But in a constantly-updated game, we can’t easily do a test like this and get meaningful results.

Most surprising to me is that there are plenty of players who don’t mind. In fact, they enjoy sharing everything – it’s part of the experience, and so is getting to see everything that’s happening to your friends who are playing. The sentiment is summed up by one player on our TSS forums who said, “Why wouldn’t you post everything?”

(Check out my GDC 2012 talk for more of my opinions on this topic.)

5. Energy and Time Gates are Used for Pacing

A common complaint by gamers who try to give Facebook gaming a shot is, “You have to spend energy to do anything, and it runs out. I don’t want to be limited.” I questioned this at first as well. But there are three good reasons Facebook games are built this way.

Examples of “Energy” mechanic variants.

First, we come back to the intended audience. As one player points out: “Social games are intended for people who do not have 90 minutes to play a video game because they have jobs, children, and other commitments. Playing it for 10 minutes a day, twice a day…” is exactly the sort of experience our target audience is looking for.

We’re asking our players to slow down, take a breather, and enjoy the time with their friends. Many players appreciate the relaxed schedule that these games create. Expecting too much gameplay in a single sitting will shift your game from a wide audience to more niche. In fact, on The Sims Social, some of our players complained about play sessions that were too long because we made activities you could do without needing energy. Imagine that! Players wanted the game sessions to be shorter! That’s the audience Facebook games serve.

Second, there’s a deeper gameplay and design motivation: Facebook games are Games as a Service, which means the developer intends to keep the game fresh with updates over time.

But that means the game needs to be paced. If you drop someone into SimCity 4, they could build an entire city in just a few days. Yes, the most hardcore players would continue to build city after city for weeks, but a lot of players would build a couple, and then be done with the game.

Energy and time gates are the pacemakers of Facebook games for good reason. If we didn’t have them in SimCity Social, most of our players would build up a city and then leave before we had a chance to release more content to keep them interested.

Third, selling energy can be a significant portion of revenue – so significant that it can make or break a game’s profitability.

There are alternatives to energy and explicit time gates, but they typically change the entire game design because they count on systems for creating endless content – like PvP, puzzles, or procedural worlds. And even then, puzzle games with potentially unlimited replayability (such as Triple Town or Diamond Dash) still often use energy-like mechanics because they remain great pacers and the games need to make money.

6. Facebook Games are Hard to Make

Another misconception is that making a Facebook game is easy. Fortunately, Facebook games don’t yet require 4 years and 100-person teams to be successful, which is roughly what it took to develop The Sims 3. However, developing The Sims Social still took 1 year and at launch the team was about 40 devs. Then the team nearly doubled in size after we launched and knew we had a hit on our hands.

One of the biggest hidden dev costs when coming from the single-player space is the server-client structure, which at least doubles dev and QA time and gives far more opportunity for bugs. A simple single-player feature can become harrowing when translated to the online space if it requires a lot of server code and security work to prevent hacks.

The team also inevitably spends countless hours optimizing for fast load times, efficient streaming algorithms, and clean memory management. You might think that because these games appear simple when compared to a console or PC game that we might not have to do all of this – but many of the best Facebook games are pushing Flash to its limits.

On top of this, Facebook games tend to have tons of UI. It’s fast and easy to design crappy UI, but designing and implement a pleasing, easy-to-use, strongly-communicative UI takes a long time with plenty of iteration.

7. Yes, You Need to Play with Friends. But...

Another common gripe is that you can’t play without bugging your friends. Many Facebook games require you to ask each other to staff buildings or give special collectibles:

Example of a standard staffing mechanic that requires friends.

Facebook games do this for 3 reasons:

It’s a way to control progress.
It makes money from players who want to pay and skip the wait.
Facebook notifications from these mechanics reminds players they have a reason to return to the game. (And sometimes they get new players to try the game out.)

The continual back-and-forth of asking friends for help and then thanking them also serves as a constant reminder of who is playing the game – and this lets you know who you can socialize with about the game when you’re not playing.

But the mechanic is in its adolescent years. It doesn’t scale well. For players who have no other friends playing, they can’t progress unless they’re willing to spend money. For players who have tons of friends, their game inboxes can get bogged down with hundreds or sometimes thousands of requests, at which point it’s all just noise. And as your friends slowly stop playing, your personal game gets tougher and tougher, like a wick slowly burning down until it dies out completely.

In my GDC 2012 talk, I convey my personal view that social games need to be more like World of Warcraft and less like Everquest, in that WoW is first and foremost a fun and friendly place for solo players, yet even better with friends, versus the constant impending doom of trying to play EQ solo. Incidentally, most social games aren’t very social – they need more true social features, like SimCity’s relationship feature where your cities can develop special standings with your friends’ cities based on how you interact with them:

In SCS, you can build your relationship between your cities by interacting with your friends’ buildings.

The friend bar shows the flavor of relationship with each friend city (Mean, Nice, or Twin Cities).

Back to friend requirements: I would love to try having staffing and other friend requirements auto-fulfill over time, where you could use friends to speed them up, but the solo player isn’t out of luck. I would also like to see easier ways to find active players to team up with, even if they aren’t your friends on Facebook. We’ve seen Zynga making progress here, but it needs to be widespread in all social games that have heavy friend requirements.

8. You Don’t Need to Spend Money to Progress

One final misconception is that you can’t progress without spending money. This only tends to be true if you have no friends who play (but I’d like to change that; see above). Otherwise, it’s easy to play SimCity Social or The Sims Social or plenty of other Facebook games without spending money. A vast majority of Facebook gamers never pay a dime, but play these games for months or even years. Where Value = Entertainment/Cost, players are getting a significant value. We’re effectively creating a singularity of infinite entertainment value.

Part of this “must spend” stigma comes from having pervasive opportunities to spend. Everywhere you look, there’s an appointment to speed up, a worker to hire, or an awesome premium object to buy. There are at least 10 different ways to spend Diamonds (the premium currency) in SimCity Social. To spenders, this represents great choice and power, and it is a very good thing. To non-spenders, it’s a reminder that they’re not getting the whole experience.

A few ways players can spend money in SimCity Social: purchasing game coins, special objects, or energy.

Players can pay for game coins, special objects, or more energy, among other things.

The truth is that developing a fantastic Facebook game costs a lot of money. And the overhead costs of running servers to support millions or tens of millions of players is high – especially when most of them never pay a dime. So we need to walk a fine line between adding enough opportunities for players to spend such that we become profitable, and going out of business because we offer too much for free.

So far, the ways we let players spend money are the best we’ve found. We can’t make players pay up front – it will limit our audience too much (and evidence from iPhone shows that free apps with microtransactions tend to make more than paid apps). We also can’t require subscriptions – not many people would trust a Facebook game enough to pay just to try it; instead we have to let you play for free so we can prove that our game is fun and worth spending money on. And we can’t switch to only paid episodic content or stop the game unless you pay at a certain level because again, that would drastically reduce our audience – all the free players would stop, but we need them to keep the social network strong.

I’d love to hear ideas for new ways to monetize a Facebook game that would (1) please the Console/PC gamer market, (2) not severely cut down our audience, and (3) not require more investment. But right now, this is the best we have.

Lastly, a Reflection on Personal Satisfaction

As a designer, I’ve had a (mostly) wonderful time working on Facebook games. After 9 years of developing PC games, it was a welcome change. I imagine it’s like going from writing plays to writing movies. It’s a new experience with some crossover; the challenges are different, and it enriches you.

You learn to respect metrics and use them in harmony with your gut design instincts. You get intriguing insights into the way players interact with your designs, and you get the amazing opportunity to react quickly, so the game evolves into a reflection of your players’ desires. You learn the utmost importance of crystal clear communication and how to design toward it (a skill that more PC/console games need to embrace). And among other things, you make tens or hundreds of millions of players happy – far more than most PC/console games.

A downside is that you get less respect from PC and console gamers – which, being a PC/console gamer myself, can weigh on me. But you get more respect from just about everyone else, including friends and relatives who tend to play more Facebook games than PC/console games and are looking for the lighter experience. My ultimate goal as a designer has always been to delight people. We launched The Sims Social in August of 2011, and one year later 15 million players still enjoyed it every month. That's pretty good.

But most of these design choices I've explained need to evolve, or the Facebook game audience will wither. There's plenty of territory to pioneer, and plenty of tired approaches that need rethinking. If Facebook games can evolve with more interesting gameplay and deeper, true social mechanics that are still appealing to the mass market, then there is hope, and potentially a bright future.

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Josh Levitan, VP of Games for Gamzee, has an interesting and level-headed response to this post, here. He agrees with many of these points -- but not all of them -- so if you're looking for another word on social games, it's worth checking out.

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Where Diablo 3 is Missing Out

6/8/2012

3 Comments

This post is not an attack on Diablo. Quite the opposite: it’s a suggestion from a designer to a game he loves.

I love Diablo 3. I loved Diablo 2. (Perhaps I’m in love with Diablo in a geeky, game-designer-sort-of way.) And I have incredible respect for the Diablo team. Not only are the Diablo games incredibly fun, but I remember having an epiphany about Diablo 2 that ended up influencing many of my personal design philosophies over the past 10 years. It was an epiphany about the nature of Diablo, and it lies at the heart of this post.

Diablo is a game about collecting loot. It always has been, and always will be. It’s a glorified slot machine with incredibly satisfying feedback.

And it’s a slot machine where even the “losing” rolls pay out, whether it’s gold, gems, crafting pages, or even just XP. But that’s not why we play. We’re here for the jackpots: the Rare items, the Set items, or better yet, the Legendary.

I won’t get into the balancing of the existing loot system or its relation to the economy of the auction house (an interesting and somewhat controversial discussion of that here). It’s a great topic, but instead, I want to offer a new way to excite and motivate players through loot.

I’d like to suggest that the current loot system is outdated because it doesn’t cater enough to the completely online, server-backed world. It’s a single player loot system rearing its head in a multiplayer game through the auction house.

Currently, everyone can find any loot in the game with the right luck. There is no history. It doesn’t matter who has already found what, or how much has been found. In other words, there is no concept of everyone competing for the same incredible jackpot. (And I’m not saying there should be less loot; I’m saying there should be more. Read on.)

Here’s how I suggest taking advantage of the online setting:

Create a new tier of items: items which are limited across all servers.

That’s it. It’s really quite simple, but it would be an incredibly powerful mechanic. There’s a reason that progressive slot machines are so popular. Diablo doesn’t even have to give away money! It only has to give away data, which makes it easy to have plenty of these linked jackpots.

Here are some details about how it would work:

Mythical Tier. There is a new tier of items above Legendary. This new tier is Mythical.
Hard Limits. Each Mythical item has a limit to how many can exist across all servers at any given time. (E.g. – If all 20 of The Spine of Anu have dropped, then it will no longer drop for anyone.)
Number Labels. Each Mythical item is labeled with its “number,” (e.g. 6 of 20). Its number is the order it dropped in. This makes the scarcity real and apparent, and would drive demand.
Drop Timeouts. Each Mythical item has a timeout on the server. If one drops, another of the same Mythical item may not drop until the timeout passes.
Tailored Stats. Mythical items are crafted toward specific classes, with only "good" combinations of stats. If a Mythical item drops for you, it is guaranteed to be for your class.

For example, the hovertip for a Mythical sword might look like this. Imagine if this dropped in your game:

Diablo 3 Mythical Item: The Spine of Anu

An example Mythical Item. Yes, the stats are verging on insane and would take careful balancing. The most important part is the Limited # display.

You’d want a nice spread of these items. Some lower level, some higher level, many for the end game. Some should have low counts to create extreme demand (e.g. – there’s only 1 World Cutter sword, and it says so). Some should have moderate counts. And others should have higher counts, on the order of 10K, such that most players at least have a hope of glimpsing one of the Mythical items in their time playing, whether it’s in the auction house, on a friend, or if they’re lucky, as a drop in their own game.

Okay, so what are the benefits of this design?

1. Creates Unprecedented Demand and Motivation
Merely by stating how many of the item will ever exist, it makes the true value of the item crystal clear. This is guaranteed scarcity. Players will know that the game won’t ever manufacture more and thus deflate their value.

Think of baseball cards. The famous 1909 Honus Wagner T206 card which sold to Wayne Gretzky for $2,800,000 is valuable not just because Wagner was one of the best players of all time, but also because the card is extremely rare, and always will be. We are guaranteed that the universe won’t print more than the original run of a few hundred.

Just as baseball cards become more valuable as fewer remain, I’d consider buffing the stats of all of the remaining copies of Mythical items each time one of them is sold to a vendor, or, heaven forbid, salvaged for blacksmithing parts.

1909 Honus Wagner

For fun, here are the parallels I see between baseball cards and Diablo loot:
Baseball player = Item stats
Card condition = Item stat variance
Card find rate in card packs (or in cigarette packs) = Item drop rate
Card print run = Limit to how many of the item will ever exist. (This is the void that Mythical items fill.)

2. Vanity
Displaying the scarcity also shifts the item from having only functional value to suddenly having value in its mere existence. Everyone can eventually gear up in Legendary items, so there’s little vanity to be had in the end game here. But few will ever have a single Mythical item, let alone multiple. They become collectors' items. A mere number label creates value out of thin air.

3. End Game
Mythical items put a face on the unattainable. Rather than thirsting for the vague notion of a “slightly better Legendary item,” you can now thirst for a Mythical item – any Mythical item at all. It’s the ultimate jackpot, and there are enough out there that you can taste them.

We know we will come across Legendary items. But we don’t know we’ll ever touch a Mythical item. The fantasy of the mythical is more alluring than the promise of the tangible.

4. Money for Blizzard and Players.
With the nearing advent of the real currency auction house, Blizzard stands to make a few good dollars on such rare items along with their finders. How much would a one-of-a-kind Mythical amulet sell for? Have you heard of the Chinese gamer who spent $16,000 on a unique sword for an MMO… before the game was even launched? Imagine how much he would have spent if he’d been playing the game for a year first. With over 10 million Diablo copies sold, I’m sure there are a few players with heaps of money and nothing to spend it on.

5. Community, Lore, and Gossip.
The other purpose of having items this scarce (and that flaunt their scarcity so well) is to create an endless chatter about them on blogs, on forums, and in the media. These items would become lore for the community. Wikis would track which ones have been found and who owns them and when they swap hands. Stories about who was there when a Mythical item dropped would be told and retold over countless lunches with friends and coworkers. (To fuel the fire, I’d even design an in-game notification that occasionally gets sent to all online players when someone finds any Mythical with a "print run" of 20 or fewer.)

The press would also pick up on any item that breaks a new sales record by selling for thousands more US dollars than before. Mythical items would effectively help Diablo 3 market itself long after traditional marketing efforts wane.

This would all work in any multiplayer online game with loot. But it feels perfect for Diablo 3. It’s time to forge new territory in loot. I believe in this so strongly that if I worked for Blizzard, I would be championing this concept with such enthusiasm that they’d have to tear away my pom-poms by force.

Have I convinced you of the value of such items to the design? What do you think?

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Thanks for reading! If you have friends who play Diablo, consider sharing or tweeting this. I’d love to get more people’s thoughts.

3 Comments

Diablo III: So good that...

5/28/2012

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Diablo III Funny buy diablo iii inside your copy of diablo iii

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About the Author

I make stuff up. Creator of Merge Dragons. 10 Year vet of Maxis as Lead Designer & Creative Director on The Sims, turned indie. Now all things Merge with Gram Games! Also, a self-proclaimed mental-neurosurgeon.