rivalries -- only for sports?

A rivalry is basically a fun sort of feud. And is it ever fun!

We rarely see them outside of sports games, because a necessary condition is that victories and defeats are not final. A nemesis or archenemy is different from a rival in that a rival cannot be permanently defeated. Each time you defeat a rival, there's a chance that rival will be back one day to defeat you. Victories are only temporary.

In fact, for the rivalry to retain emotional gravity, the competitive balance must remain relatively even. If you know you're always going to win against the enemy, then there's little emotional investment in the game.

Another necessary element of rivalries is history. Pointing a player to another as his rival can add a bit of fun, but the emotional investment in that rivalry is meek compared to if the two players shared a history. The longer and more eventful the history, the more powerful that rivalry becomes... which is why I can't wait to see Bama roll over Auburn this year!


Mario vs Bowser can be called a rivalry in Mario Kart and Super Smash Brothers. I grew up on Nintendo consoles, so I knew those two had been locked in a never-ending battle for years. I still would not call that rivalry if the those characters met only in Mario adventure games, but the many competitive spin-offs have allowed Bowser to have his share of wins, too.

Even so, Bowser and Mario share a public history only (to my knowledge) in the adventure games. Their interactions in the competitive spin-offs are limited to personal histories. Mario always wins in the adventure games, no matter who's playing. Bowser's victories were seldom recorded and shared.

Notice that those Mario spin-offs in which a rivalry exists are, again, sports games.

Warhammer Online is a non-sport that includes rival factions. For long-time Warhammer IP fans, those rivalries have long and eventful histories, so they are powerful. But for players new to the IP, like me, WAR is like suddenly joining a centuries-old feud you know nothing about. Thankfully, the history there is a living history, seen in the game's environments and felt throughout gameplay. But the rivalries are still shallow in comparison to sports if you're new to the IP. And while sports have dozens of teams with many rivalries, WAR is limited to just three (not counting the broad Order vs Destruction).


So, considering all that, how can deep and lasting rivalries be included in non-sports games or developed over time among their players? How can that gap between sports and non-sports be better bridged?

Networking: non-linear faction

Today, Brian challenges folks to design a quest around an area which requires significant player investment to access. If the player had to work to reach the area, there had better be something worth going there for.

I suggested going with a faction reward. One of the NPCs in the more accessible gameworld is connected somehow with one or more of the NPCs in this offset area. By coming back to the mainland NPC with evidence of the meeting, the player would have a new faction standing only possible that way. It's not just the next leg of a questline. It's a faction relationship with ongoing benefits (quests, further networking opportunities, gear, etc)... benefits which can be added to or modified by developers at any time.

It occurred to me that what I was suggesting is a non-linear NPC relationship.

In current MMOs (and games in general), factions appear almost exclusively as ladders. They're linear. "Finish this job, and I'll give you the next one." or "Finish this job, and you'll be promoted (so I can give you the next job)." A few single-player games, like Deus Ex, offered branching questlines; the player could choose which branch to follow. But even those were basic; essentially about progression from StepA to StepB.

Another possibility is realistic networking. Networking reaches out, not just up. In a game that's less about levelling than about exploring and experiencing, ala Star Wars: Galaxies, networking is a viable and more engaging form of faction gameplay.

Let's use a Star Wars universe for an example. Hans Solo (a smuggler) knows Lando (a mine owner), Luke (a jedi) and Leia (a princess and military official). They're all bigshots, right? They're people with a lot of power or influence. But Hans and Lando probably also know some mechanics and small-time smugglers. Luke grew up on a farm, so he could point you to some farmer friends and maybe have some trading pull with the Jawas near his hometown. Leia... well, ok, so maybe Leia only knows important people.

The point is that those connections back to people of lesser power and fame can be just as valuable at times, even when you're discounting personalities.

And, perhaps more importantly, connections are personal. Players would take more interest in the NPCs they interacted with if they knew that not every other player (or every other player of their particular class) had the same relationships. It certainly takes more planning from developers, but more intricate NPC relationships could offer replayability and customization.

Maybe my character has strong relationships with a lot of rough and shady NPCs, while your character flirts with various NPCs with political interests (large and small). As I've suggested somewhere before, one player's faction can temporarily influence the group's faction. If my character's in good standing with Joe Roughneck and you have neutral faction with him, then he'll be somewhat amenable to you as long as you're grouped with me. On the other hand, if you stole Joe's money purse just last week, then Joe might not speak a word to me as long as you're around.

And, of course, faction doesn't have to take the form of an on/off switch. It doesn't have to be as simple as "Good faction = offer the player a quest / Bad faction = be rude and send the player away". Neverwinter Nights had NPCs which acknowledge more graded differences, like intelligence and appearance. Rewards can be as simple as different dialogue options, but they can go further.

If players had truly individual sets of relationships with NPCs, and one player's network of NPC ties could affect another player's gameplay, faction gameplay would be more fun and worthwhile.

Multiple faction conflicts

It's great to involve the player in an epic struggle through faction conflict, such as the Galactic Civil War between the Empire and the Rebellion in Star Wars: Galaxies. But that epic conflict doesn't have to be the only faction conflict, and players don't have to owe allegiance to only one community.

All persons have multiple allegiances. You might have loyalties to friends, to family, to your nation, to your local area, to a club, to a religious or political organization, and on and on. So if it's so common to have multiple loyalties and participate in multiple faction conflicts in real life, a similar situation certainly wouldn't feel strange in a game.

One way this can show up is conflicting loyalties, a dominant theme in most successful stories of fiction. If you played Deus Ex, then you might remember your character having to decide between his loyalty to his government employer and his loyalty to his brother (who the government agency claimed to be a traitor), with a strong consequence in terms of gameplay. Likewise, an MMO player might have to decide between a larger faction and a more local faction.

But it's also possible to allow a player to join multiple faction conflicts which do not directly relate to one another. The player might be a soldier in the epic war (pick a side), a crafter in a city's Traders Guild (which competes with other cities), a frequent military escort for a friendly local NPC (who the local bandit faction likes to target), a defender of the region's "Hadrian's Wall" (which holds back some really nasty monsters only so long as players continue to cull their population), and so forth.

Characters of any fiction are often more interesting when they have multiple loyalties, multiple goals and considerations; when they are not just stick-figures that look the same from every side. Aside from offering players a greater variety of gameplay options, allowing players to join multiple factions and on-going conflicts would make their characters deeper and more worthy of attachment.

Group faction

Over in Cameron's blog on mindless killing, Potshot made an interesting comment:

I would love a bunch of NPCs to say, “well you three can pass, but not the Dwarf! He killed Arglebargle! Get ‘em boys!!”

Before reading that, I had never considered players with different faction standings being grouped and adventuring together. Of course, it seems so obvious now!

It's possible to introduce a new dynamic into gameplay: group influence on faction standing.

"No, it's alright. He's with me." That's basically the sort of feature I'm talking about. If your faction standing with the Freeport Guards sucks, they might still let you through the gate without any trouble if you're grouped with three or four players who have good standing with that faction. If your standing with them is really terrible or your groupmates have only neutral faction with the guards, then they'll still bar you from entering the city.

It could work both ways, of course. If your groupmates forgot to tell you that they killed a few of these guards last week, you might be in for a nasty surprise when the guards come after you as well.

There's a lot of gameplay that's made possible by this sort of system.

Perhaps you have very little chance of earning enough faction with the royal family to go where you want in the royal palace (possibly to reach a quest-related figure). If you can ingratiate yourself with the right NPC with some relationship to the royal family, you might be able to accomplish your goal indirectly. Perhaps you make a friend of a palace steward when you see him in the market square. Then you can walk with him back to the palace; the palace guards watch you suspiciously, but they don't say anything while you're with the steward.

That little adventure could be complicated in any number of ways. Perhaps the steward needs further convincing once you're inside the palace. Perhaps you need to leave the steward's company once inside to find what you need, then find the steward again or sneak past the guards (easier to do when they're focused on people entering). Maybe the steward changes his mind once he sees what you really came to the palace for, and he calls the guards.

Anyway, what else might be done with this system? How might you tweak it?