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.
2 comments:
Some interesting points here on top of what was already a very interesting article. I feel that too many games these days try to fill too much in for the player and need to encourage them to use their imaginations more. While I understand the importance of setting clear goals it is also possible to get players to make their own goals. Games like Eve have created their own history through the warring corporations and it’s all set up by the players themselves. I love the idea of an mmo that is open enough to allow the players to influence the world’s history in such a way. I also tend to get bored and lose interest after hitting the level cap so games need some way to allow you to continue feeling like you are progressing in some way as this is actually the addictive part of these games. I also don’t see why MMO’s need to have a clear cut off point called the end game. They should feel continuous throughout.
Sorry it took me awhile to get around to responding back to you about this. First, it's good to hear from you... it's been too long!
I have a dirty secret in that I actually really love a lot about EVE too, but I've never been able to play it for very long because I've never been able to find others to play it with. I've established a fairly close circle of gaming friends over the past decade and playing MMOs without them anymore is generally a let down. So maybe I'll pick it up for a little bit while I wait for GW2.
My one criticism of EVE, and it's the weakness of any true sandbox, is that it's hard to capture and communicate a narrative. It's easy to get lost in game so massive and not really have a sense of where you are or whether or not what you're doing matters. It's why I believe it is vitally important to develop a deep sense of social connectedness in these games to let them transcend "sandbox", where people are building and playing with toys to no real end goal. Players need to be free to choose how they act, react, group, and compete - but they also need a world to send forces at them that mix things up.
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