EverQuest Sequel Shows Complexity, Ditches PvP

Thanks to GameSpy for its hands-on preview of Sony Online's forthcoming PC MMO EverQuest II, as the author discusses the graphics ("EverQuest II is one of the most beautiful games in development... Every square inch begs to be explored"), the play style ("EQ2 has a smaller, more intimate feel, more like tabletop roleplaying games centered on small parties"), and the complexity ("Everyone starts on the same island, then has to choose allegiance to one of two main cities (and belief systems!) From there, more and more options open up, sort of like an inverted gameplay pyramid.") Elsewhere, over at EQ2 Stratics there's further confirmation from devs that: "There are no plans for a PvP [Player vs. Player] server at release. There is no ETA on when or if we will ever have one."

Comments

So?

[obeythefist]

It's still going to be a levelling treadmill. People will still farm loot.

But it will look prettier and so it will garner more subscriptions for Sony.

Re:So?

[ADRA]

But instead of making it fun, will they take away some of the better parts of MMO's?

REAL Content?
Asherons Call 1 was the only game I could stand for longer than a month because there was always so much content.

Reason for dropping it:
Costs too much money to add more and more content into the game.

PVP for some edge?
If you havn't played in a PVP, You feel physically scared making a mad dash in & out of town fearing a random player coming around and taking a run at you. I wouldn't make PVP manditory, but its definitly an interesting piece.

Reason for dropping it:
Costs too much to balance PVP vs. non-PVP combat.

Re:So?

[AuMatar]

Add real content instead of artificially stretching it out by adding time wasting treadmills?

Not that I expect Sony to do this, but the first MMO designer to do so and not horribly fuck up the game (Shadowbane did so, but forgot to add the content qand realesed the 2nd most buggy game I've seen in my life) will rake in the cash.

Re:So?

[*weasel]

No other genre outside of RPGs seems to need levelling treadmills to engage players.

They all have to use this thing called 'content' to keep players involved with their game.

Gameplay for Super Mario Brothers doesn't revolve around getting progressively bigger in order to jump onto progressively larger mushroom men. Grand Theft Auto tends to keep players engaged without giving Tommy Vercetti successively more armor and health so he can defeat successively stronger bad guys.

Power progression is fine, to an extent. But it is by no means a reasonable design for the entirety of gameplay. The Strategy genres have done well by unlocking additional units, and powers over time -- but they don't make players grind a map 10 to 20 times to unlock the next unit.

Sure, actual content is much more difficult to create, and there's a very definite end to it. But there's a definite end to the treadmill too. The only difference between the two, is that the treadmill can be slowed down so that you have to experience their distinct lack of content over and over and over again. It's very hard to slow down progression through actual content.

Power progression is dismissable in single player RPGs - but in an MMO it creates too many problems to be considered a harmless tradition.

Re:So?

[*weasel]

Your general population would burn through that content much too quickly for your MMO to have any legs at all

No, your hardcore population would burn through that in no time. But they'll burn through your treadmill in (comparatively) no time as well. The only benefit to a treadmill is that it is easy to tune to slow people down. Actual content -- well that has to be fun, and well crafted. The negatives of treadmills -- that could fill a book.

The rub is that the casual market, the people who have rejected the treadmill, is thus far undefined. Unfortunately every game to this point has either exposed casual players as victims in a harsh PvP environment, been a technical disaster, alienated them with treadmills, or some combination of the three.

Repetitive content is a sure thing to capture a known crowd -- but that doesn't make it a must. What it does, unfortunately, is make it a must for corporate funding. SOE, EA, and Vivendi won't very well sink $10m+ into an MMO that's aiming for an unproven market. Particularly not after The Sims Online.

But no other form of entertainment dares to subject their consumers to repetitive content just to slow them down. What author pads a novel with repetitive slag, just to ensure that speed readers don't finish in a day? What TV series pads its DVDs with timesinks to ensure that hardcore fans can't watch an entire season in a night? Is it really so awful if a subset of your fans finish?

The hardcore, obsessive, audience is not the audience; It is an audience. This subset of the potential audience should never be confused for the entirety of that potential audience.

Re:So?

[*weasel]

I think it's optimistic to call the storyline of Everquest 'non-linear'. I think 'non-existent' would be more fair. I think equating the position within a storyline or set of levels of SMB, to a set of numbers associated with an EQ character is a mistake.

It is precisely EQ's lack of context given to its gameplay that is the problem. It isn't 'levelling' per se, it's that true progression in EQ requires takes place outside of any sort of story context.

In a single player RPG, character progression and story progression are fairly neck-and-neck. You level as a matter of course while experiencing the world. You dont experience some story, then go camp gnolls until you're ready for the next bit.

In treadmill games, the context to progression is nonexistant, or too far behind character progression. Everquest requires repetition outside of the progressive context of the story, in order to unlock the next chapter.

The treadmill accusation isn't an indictment of levelling overall - because one could easily run into the same problems in a skill-based system. But rather a charge against levelling for the sake of levelling -- power gain for the sake of power gain.

The idea that a tangible reward at the end of play is required is another point of departure between us. My contention is that if the journey is good, the total enjoyment is enough of a reward. A player doesn't have to be given a pile of fake money or a bigger sword to validate the adventure of killing the dragon. He needs something to ensure that he's capable of meeting the next challenge - but the desire should be to meet the new challenge - not to get a widget that makes the current challenge easier.

As you note, doing levelling 'right', where it is a byproduct of having fun doing quests is expensive - but that's where persistent worlds are going. Blizzard is aiming to do exactly that with World of Warcraft, and for the most part City of Heroes offers that today.
Actually, CoH is something akin to what I'm advocating. It has no loot to speak of - and levels are largely a by product of going through the story. The EQ crowd isn't very fond of CoH -- because they burn through the content very fast, and there isn't any 'loot'. But the game has pulled in a very respectable number of subscriptions thus far - particularly for a nearly unmarketed game.

Now there's certainly a viable niche for games that have no predefined story. Free-form sandbox games closer to UO, and The Sims Online. But treadmills and 'loot' have even less of a place in such games.

Re:So?

[*weasel]

Really? Watch nearly any network television series. Assuming they even have an overall story arc that continues through the season you will still have a variety of 'filler' shows that have nothing to do with advancement of the character or promotion of the storyline.

Are you honestly suggesting that the non-big-conspiracy-plot episodes of X-Files are equivalent to camping a static spawn in Everquest?

A tangential episode may not progress the overall story arc - but it has a story and progression of its own. Mulder isn't just spawn camping El Chupacabra until the Smoking Man is ready to kick off the next step of a sinister plot.

He's presented with a smaller, perhaps self-contained or mini-arc mystery that he has to work through. People watch week-to-week. If a series actually employed 'filler' on par with EQ, it'd fail in a heartbeat. If 'filler' episodes of ER weren't engaging, no-one would care who is HIV positive, or has a brain tumor.

The lack of a central story arc is also fine -- provided that each episode is entertaining and the dramatic context is existent.

Online games likewise need to keep people playing in order to survive

Absolutely true. The incorrect assumption there, is that they need to keep the same people playing without any further development cost - and that if a hardcore subset 'finishes' before the next content expansion is available, everyone will quit.

I also don't buy into your pessimistic view of the profit margins of a persistent world game.

they need methods to make players continue to remain in the game

The content should do that. Providing them a string of slightly larger foozles to whack with slightly larger sticks unnecessarily limits your audience. It's more counterproductive than offering an achievable 'end'.

That won't turn a profit

Yes, your example is not fiscally sound. The solution there is not to spend $20m and not have a target of 400k copies. The solution is to spend $6-8m and have a break-even at somewhere around 200k copies. City of Heroes reportedly cost in the $8m range, and has sold very well to date. Though I cannot find exact unit numbers, the fact that it's been at NPD's number 1 spot for PC game sales in the US for the last 2 months bespeaks a genuine hit. (200k copies is not an unreasonable estimate for what its total run will be)

or cover the costs of other games that are partially completed before being cancelled

Come on now, these 'other games' should have their own theoretical $20m budgets. If you're going to suggest part of the revenue pie from one project has to float others - then you have to be honest about the cost. If there is more than 1 game in development to float, then it doesn't actually cost $20m to make one of these games -- and one game being unable to support the development of several isn't really indicative of its economic viability.

What it is saying, however, is that your idea of simply letting people proceed through the content at a breakneck pace does not work for an MMO.
And once again, you're assuming the entirety of the audience, or at least the fiscally significant portion, does indeed go through content at a breakneck pace.

You are ignoring that there is a large audience of gamers that simply does not have the time, nor the desire to spend 6 hours a day gaming, let alone with a single game. I'm saying the much larger audience will be consuming content at somewhere around 6 hours a week.

You are also ignoring that the mechanics of treadmill design disincentives new players. A treadmill game has to sell a ton of copies out of the gate, because the level stratification of players effectively alienates late-comers.

All good episodic content provides suitable hooks to let late-comers get up to speed fairly quickly, and have enough context to enjoy even a single episode -- even if it means they 'miss out' on old cont

At least its better then a broken promise...

[JExtine]

"There are no plans for a PvP [Player vs. Player] server at release. There is no ETA on when or if we will ever have one."

Well, at least that's better then Sony telling everyone there is going to be PvP at release, then backing out on it, implementing it 3-4 months later, and debugging it a couple more months after that. Then again, with no ETA, who knows if it will ever be implemented or just another broken promise...

Ultima has an opening here

[voss]

A complete rework of Ultima Online adding Complexity and using the Ultima interface which is so much more sensible than that gawdawful EQ interface might topple EQ.

Re:No PvP = no subscription for me

[Golias]

There is nothing more challenging than playing vs another human being

Correction: There are few things less challenging than playing an MMORPG dual against another human being. There is no skill involved in the combat system of these games, apart from the group tactics of fighting large armies of NPC mobs. If you win a PVP match-up in Everquest, AC, or whatever, you have accomplished pretty much nothing. You won because you went into the fight with the more powerful PVP character.

If you want be "challenged" by other people, go outside and play golf, tennis, basketball, or at the very least play an FPS game on your computer. MMORPG PvP is a joke.

Not immature, just different.

[Mongoose Disciple]

PvP attracts the immature set..

That's not entirely true.

Here's a paper written a long time ago about different player types in MUDs. It holds for other games as well. If you dig around, you can also probably find a test to tell you what type you are.

Granted, I think the author's own biases show. He describes the "killer" type, which would be the type drawn to PvP, as about griefing. I don't think that's true, though it might certainly seem so from an achiever standpoint. More, I think it's about competition, about an ideal that you're the best because you can and do go out and beat other people, not because you log more hours.

Players of the current crop of MMORPGs are almost universally achievers by Bartle's model. If you wonder why these games turn into super levelling treadmills, the answer is fairly simple: It's because that's what their core audience genuinely wants. They might bitch about the timesink that it is, but their choice to continue playing demonstrates more clearly than words that they anything but despise it.