Monday, July 9, 2012

Glowing Purple Armor and Questicles


A post from an old friend has brought me out of blogging pseudo-retirement. You should start by reading his post:


First off, this is exactly the kind of analysis and game theory crafting that I engage in with my close friends quite often, so finding this blog has been a breath of fresh air--a well-reasoned, intelligent discussion hidden among a virtually endless supply of half-assed, poorly written, mass-produced drivel. Kudos, Cavernshark.

I essentially agree with what's been written, with a few minor differences. The biggest objection I would raise is really just a matter of semantics, but it's an important distinction to me, so I'll make it. The use of the term "end game" generally refers to a point in any MMO that I hate. It embodies the idea of mindless tedium as a means to achieve mostly-meaningless goals. Admittedly, my perception is highly colored by my experience with World of Warcraft, but then whose isn't?

The Problem

Ultimately, I play a game for the journey. That's where all the fun is. With WoW, getting to 60/70/80/85 is one journey, while grinding up gear and raiding is another. For me personally, the first journey was more fun than the second, but that was mostly because the second journey lacked even the facade of a goal. It goes something like this:

1. Grind grind grind, get a piece of gear.
2. Show off your gear to your buddies.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 ad nauseum, until you can:
4. Kill Onyxia/The Lich King/A Giant World-Eating Panda or whatever the hell is the current boss of the month, and get a better piece of gear.
5. Kill it again, and again, and again, until all your gear glows bright purple and everyone else standing around, bored as hell with nothing to do at the bank in Stormwind can see how awesome you are.
6. Call everyone else a noob. Congrats, you have beaten WoW.

Now, I understand that there is an entirely other side of the end-game that I never engaged in, which is the PvP side of things. Not my thing, and from what I've observed, it's a relatively small subculture of WoW players that prefers PvP to raiding.

Why do I like the first journey better? It's more dynamic. Landscapes change, questgivers change, and there's a consistent, permeating sense of progression. Now, some of that enthusiasm ebbs when you figure out that this progression, too, is mostly meaningless and arbitrary, and the fanfare at hitting the level cap is quickly diminished when you figure out that it's really only the beginning of tedium. Let's face it: hitting the level cap is rather anti-climactic. You don't hit 85 by completing an epic quest where you slay a waffle-breathing dragon wearing rocket boots. You hit 85 because you were in the middle of fetching 32 boiled newts from the bellies of giant lava slugs for quest giver 367 who you don't give two shits about, and you happened to strike down your Nth lava slug, which magically granted you the expertise of a total badass.

The point that I'm getting at is that all goals defined by the devs in an MMO are usually completely arbitrary and don't actually present the player with a worthwhile objective, because they are never meant to provide a lasting sense of completion and satisfaction. Most MMOs just end for players when they wake up one day, running to generic dungeon number 7 and think to themselves "Why the fuck am I still playing this?" Ultimately, the best goals that motivate players are those that they create for themselves within the system.

(Part of) The Solution

Disclosure: I play (and love) EVE.

Fact: EVE has been around longer than WoW, released in 2003 (WoW released 2004). EVE subs continue to grow year after year.

The reason for this, as best I can tell, is that there are no arbitrary player goals assigned by the game. Players create their own agendas, their own plans, and their own end game. The system is designed in such a way that it provides you with a sense of progression and change for as long as you want it to. If your end game is to take over the EVE universe, go for it. Nobody says it can't technically happen, but be prepared for disappointment.

So when I read that end game content needs to be the primary focus for developers, I think we need to look at end game content differently. End game content shouldn't be just a set of activities that you can do once you jump off the level treadmill, designed to keep the player mindlessly enslaved to your subscription model. End game activities should be an integral part of the game design from the very beginning, when the developers think:

1. What, ultimately, do we want players to do in this game?
2. What epic storylines does our IP allow for, and how can we translate those into meaningful objectives that give players enjoyment and a sense of accomplishment?
3. How can we allow, and even facilitate player-created goals and objectives? *If we've learned anything from EVE, it's that these have the most lasting effect on player motivation

Let's change gears now. I could rant on that for hours, but I want to address some specific things mentioned in the original post.

Player Social Structures, Developer Limitations, and Player-Driven Development

The idea of having flexible player social structures is intriguing to me. I think it's great. I think that it would open up a lot of different possibilities for player interaction. I also think that a prerequisite to implementation for a system like what Cavernshark described would be a single-sharded world/universe, as in EVE. When playing WoW, I often found myself wishing that I could join one or more social circles who played the game but operated on different servers. In this situation, having more than one affiliation would be meaningless if only one social circle existed on a given shard. Still, kudos for an awesome, original idea.

Another point was made in the original post about the limitations of software developers. As an employee of a software company that operates as a subsidiary of a subsidiary of one of the IT industry's biggest players, I can absolutely confirm that we run on a triage basis. We throw tons of money at development, but it's never enough. We have a wish-list of features that's embarrassingly large, and most of it gets thrown on the back burner, because we're constantly switching from Oh-Shit-We-Broke-Something Mode over to Let's-Find-New-And-Inventive-Ways-To-Break-Our-Software Mode and back again. Somehow we end up with a decent product, but it's a never-ending cycle and you just have to live with the fact that development resources are always scarce.

So with that in mind, it seems to me that the Holy Grail of game design is to make something that is infinitely moddable.

Confession: I love Minecraft, and if you don't, then you are a bad person. The thing is, I haven't played vanilla Minecraft ever since I discovered mods. In fact, mods resurrected an otherwise waning appetite for the game and turned it into a raging, uncontrollable hunger that just takes hold of me at unpredictable times. When I have a severe case of the Minecrafties, there's nothing that will sate my appetite other than locking myself away for a few days and pounding away at chunky blocks in 8 bit pixilated glory. When I finally emerge from my Minecraft-induced, caffeine-fueled nerd marathon, I swear never to touch it again. That usually lasts about 6 weeks. I have been clean for 4 weeks now.

It goes to support my point, however, that player driven content is what gives players motivation. In minecraft, my goals are all my own and the means to achieve them is mostly provided by other players. The mods I use are Industrial Craft, Buildcraft, Redpower, Extra Pipes (teleport pipes for BC), and Power Converters for IC and BC. Hundreds of hours have been put into the development of these mods. Mojang, the creators of Minecraft, have spent absolutely nothing in the development of this content.

Similarly, my new obsession is Day Z. Now to clarify, Day Z is actually a mod--not the title of the game that is required to run it; yet I couldn't care less about Arma II. To hell with realistic FPS combat sims, I want to kill zombies. I shelled out $30 to the creators of Arma II just so I could play a free mod that made their crappy game worth buying. Me and almost half a million other people.

Rocket, the creator of this mod which has likely brought in revenues in excess of $10 million for the Arma team, was paid nothing to create it. He made it because he loved the framework that the original title provided and saw its potential. A free mod has generated more sales than 10 DLC packs could ever have done for this game.

My point here is that the MMORPG community has yet to release a popular title that is open enough to be modded, but that is exactly what it needs. You want endless content? Let the community develop it for you. Are there challenges with this model? Absolutely, but I have to believe that the challenges can be overcome. I certainly don't think that it's the only way that a good MMO can be made now, but I really want to see someone take a decent stab at it.

tl;dr
I have awesome armor and you are all noobs.