Developer Retrospective on the MMORPGs of 2004

An anonymous reader writes "The Corporation recently posted a four-part series asking a few well known MMOG developers their opinions of the past year in the genre. Participants include Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series and Tabula Rasa, Walter Yarbrough, Content Producer for Dark Ages of Camelot, Damion Schubert, former Lead Designer for Meridian59, the cancelled UO2, and presently the Lead Designer for Shadowbane, and Raph Koster, former Lead Designer for Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and present Creative Director for Sony Online Entertainment."

Comments

EQ2 - best mmporg of the year

[BigHungryJoe]

I hear a lot about WoW, and yes, it is fun if (1) you don't want a challenge in your game (I did 20 levels in 3 days) and (2) if you like the sort of cheap cartoony-type graphics most 7 or 8 year olds like.

Now, EQ2, on the other hand, is a fantastic game. The creative content is far and away the best, it has the richest backstory, the most unbelievable graphics, and finally, it is extremely challenging. Failure to pay careful attention to group strategy (and strategies differ inside and outside of a dungeon!) will lead to certain death.

So, yes, if you just want a game you can "win" and that will level you with minimal effort to make you feel good about yourself, by all means, play WoW. Otherwise, go EQ2.

Re:EQ2 - best mmporg of the year

[gclef]

Ah, see...that's the point that Blizzard understands and Verant has lost sight of: games are *entertainment*. So, something that makes me, as you put it, "feel good about myself" is much better entertainment than something that feels like work. I do enough work already. When I hit a quest in WoW where I had to log out & look it up on a hint sight, it was very jarring, and very, very rare...I had to do that all the time in EQ.

Challenging is fine, and I am playing one of the more complex classes in WoW for the challenge (warlock). But, at its base, this is still entertainment...I don't want my entertainment to feel like work. It should be fun.

Re:EQ2 - best mmporg of the year

[TooMuchEspressoGuy]

Without trying to start a flame war, I will say that, while trying to choose the next MMO to play in the past month or so, I did some research on both EQ2 and WoW, and talked extensively to people who play each game. Unfortunately, without trying to start a flame war, I can say that this poster exemplifies the general attitude of the EQ2 community. To them, challenge equals the amount of time you have to spend on a game and not how hard the game actually *is*. To offer an example of what I mean: I consider Contra on the NES to be one of the most challenging games ever made, yet one could essentially beat it within a few days of "hardcore" playtime.

No, what EQ2 and most other MMORPG's offer is not a challenge, but a timesink. You cannot solo past level 20 or so at any pace other than "unbelievably slow", so you are forced to spend perhaps hours seeking a group; you incur a penalty when *another person in your group* dies; simple things like crafting and travel take tons of time and resources; and so on and so forth. However, WoW, with its action-based gameplay, has been perhaps the most challenging MMO I've ever played, not in terms of the time needed to get anything done, but in terms of *real,* Contra-like challenge.

I won't address this poster's other points, since they're largely opinion. But I will say this: a game should not take "effort" beyond the effort required to have fun. I'm glad the WoW developers recognized this fact and made the game a *game,* rather than just another bunch of timesinks.

Re:EQ2 - best mmporg of the year

[EulerX07]

FFXI is the worst game for people who have a life. I should know, I had a THF50/WAR37/DRK30 with all jobs unlocked, most leveled to lvl 10+.

A typical FFXI session would be : log on at 6:00pm, get my 2 friends into a party and frantically search for a WHM and 2 damage dealers. Any evening where getting WHM was easy, there was no good damage dealers available. Around 7-7:30 if we're lucky, we can set out to go camp. Around 8pm, we're in position, we start killing, it's good. Around 8:45 pm the whm has to leave for whatever reason, the whole evening is shot.

Then you've levelled a bit, let's get some equipment! Great news : that amazingly good dagger for lvl 50 thieves is dropped by a lvl 76 HNM. In other words high levels are making you pay trough the nose for it because there's no way in hell a lvl 50 can go get it for himself, even if there's 18 lvl 50 trying together. So we go farm. 10k gil an hour is the best you can hope to, so there goes THIRTY hours of farming items because that dagger is 300k. Wanna camp a high value item instead? Well, join the 10 other campers at Mee Deggi/Leaping Lizzy/Valkurm Emperor/etc. The monster appears every hour to 1.5 hour, so keep a clock near your computer. Oh, and you might get 4-5 kills and still get no drop, the drop is rare.

FFXI was an exercise in masochism. The nice part of EQ2 is I can group with my 2 RL friends, play 2-3 hours and make progress, then stop for the week. Very casual friendly in my experience.

Haven't played WoW, but I've seen a couple of people say it's "revolutionary". I might be a skeptic, but if it's "revolutionary" like Warcraft was to Command&Conquer and Dune 2, then I'll have to disagree.

Re:EQ2 - best mmporg of the year

[_xeno_]

I've played both. WoW is set up so that you can make some amount of progress on any amount of time. If you get a group together, you'll make more progress. If not, then you can still make progress, just at a slower rate.

The thing that WoW has down that a lot of other MMORPGs - and RPGs in general - lack is that they worked real hard to give you a sense of progress. While a quest in FFXI might be "hunt monster until you finally get a single rare drop" a similar quest in WoW might be "hunt monster until you get 6 of an uncommon drop" where "uncommon" means that it drops 10% of the time. So while it might take just as long to complete, you're slowly making progress, instead of slowly getting more and more frusterated. (On that note, my brother finally completed Genkai 1 and can stop bugging me about it...)

Crafting is similar - you're guarenteed to raise a level on certain clearly marked recipes, and you'll never fail. So unlike FFXI were you slowly try and repeat the same recipe endlessly without seeing much progress, in WoW you'll repeat the same recipe endlessly but actually see progress.

This is what people really enjoy in WoW - they feel like they're actually accomplishing something instead of just wasting time. There's nothing more annoying in FFXI than going on a coffer hunt for two hours and not getting a single key, or finally grabbing that rare NM and not getting a drop. (Stupid Ose.) WoW is tweaked to reduce the frusteration factor. That's what's really "revolutionary" about it. Other than that, it's really just a rehash of things that other MMORPGs have already done.

Of course, WoW has only really succeeded in making me more excited about what Square might do for a successor to FFXI. What can I say - it's just not fun if you can't get the Red Mage hat. :)

Player hardship vs gaming challange

[Anonymous Coward]

Walter Yarbrough: I'm also curious about the success of Vanguard's approach of "We're going to make this hard, and you'll like it!" Particularly when compared with the much more casual and penalty-free playstyle of WoW.

I can tell you about the success of that approach: Bollocks to that!

I abandoned EverQuest because the high-end game was a boring chore rather than an exciting challange. Camping for weeks or months on end for your mob to spawn is a "challange" only in respect of trying to hold your eyelids open. In reality, it's simply player hardship for its own sake.

It seems that because of the ambiguity of the word "hard", some designers can't tell the difference between the two things, and which is good and which is bad.

Re:Player hardship vs gaming challange

[Dragoon412]

I don't know, on one hand, I welcome challenge in a game, but on the other, I think it'll be exactly as you describe.

So long as MMOs are nothing but graphical spreadsheets, with the game engine handling (read: mangling) all the subtleties of combat, "challenge" is sort of a misnomer.

WoW isn't any more or less challenging than any other MMO I've ever played. EQ, DAoC, UO, AO, WoW... they're all of roughly the same complexity, with pretty shallow combat. The only challenges that come into play are getting the smacktards in your group to do their job right, and your frustration.

Indeed, when I read that Vanguard will be challenging, what I understand is "Vanguard will have horendously bad death pentalties and a a mind-blowingly long leveling treadmill."

And like you said: Bollocks to that!

Re:Player hardship vs gaming challange

[Demonspawn]

I usto be a programer for MUDs. Having designed several areas for different games, I've found out the following:

1. Some games require massive timesinks. People who play these games have an elieteism that they've spent more time on the game than you, and therefore are better. They actually consider the timesink 'hardness' to be an asset. These people played EQ1 ;) The easiest timesink to add is to require grouping. Nothing is as horid as waiting for the required class to log on so you can do something.

2. It is VERY hard to balance classes. Most games have 4 core classes (Tank, Healer, Magical Damage, Melee Damage) In graphical games, you can add on a 5th core class of crowd control. Since any class beside the core 4/5 is a class that can do more than one job, just less effectively, it becomes difficult to create an encounter that can be acomplished by non-cores without it being a cakewalk to a perfect core party.

3. The only real way to make a 'harder' encounter is to require more people or higher levels. Yes, there may be a 'trick' way of pulling off the 50 person EQ raid with 30, but someone will post that to a messageboard and then everyone is doing the encounter with 30. From a content creator's perspective, I had an encounter that required a full party (10) of high levels that probally required at least 6-7 of them to be core. It got stomped by 6 when they discovered a 'bug' in the encounter (a 'trick' that I did not intend). I congraulated them, and then quickly fixed the bug ;) Oh the messages I got when they tried it again....

--Demonspawn

Re:Player hardship vs gaming challange

[coupland]

Yeah I have to agree. I think 99% of all "video" games ever made are designed around a false assumption: that players enjoy failing. So games are all built around the concept of completing tasks of ever-increasing difficulty where you are rewarded for success and punished for failure. Punishment is usually doled out in the way of death, XP debt, item wear, lost money etc. What is wrong with this picture?

Surely in 1985 a puzzle was a sure way to keep people occupied, and increasing levels of difficulty is what kept people interested in what was ultimately an extremely repetitive and simple game. It was necessary. But no longer. Game designers are stuck with principles that only served them on a Commodore 64.

Now we have massively multiplayer online games with massive, sprawling maps that make up entire worlds. Games should be open-ended and engaging, players should be driven by a love to explore an amazing new world. To see and do everything they possibly can in a fantasy world that they relate to. Not continue to pursue a punishment/reward feedback loop. Kill, level, kill, die, kill, level, die... Games designers, wake up!

Re:Player hardship vs gaming challange

[Negatyfus]

It will be interesting to see if Dungeons and Dragons Online will ever see the light of day. They say combat will be real-time rather than turn-based. Of course, dungeons will be instanced...

D&D Online FAQ

Re:EQ2 - best mmporg of the year NOT TRUE

[redKrane]

Your WoW comments are horrible. 20 levels in 3 days implies nothing more than you playing the game for the better part of those 3 days. It says nothing about the "challenge" of the game.

Cheap cartoony graphics? Well there are 1000's of adults who truly enjoy those "cheap" graphics. Tell that to the Blizzard artists while you're at it.

Richest backstory? EQ's story is nothing more than another rehashing of Tolkienesque characters and lore. At least WoW has its own back story which I remind you has existed a lot longer than EQ.

WoW is just as strategic as EQ, and you will die if tactics arent in order. You wouldnt know that cause you stopped at lvl 20, right when quests start to get a lot harder.

WoW is a great game that is literally saving the genre whilst you whine about returning to the glory days of EQ.

Re:WoW - best mmporg of the year

[BigHungryJoe]

In terms of hours, I probably played 10-12 hours per day.

I meant the original post to be more provocative and less flamebait, but as I reread it, I can see I failed at that.

I think one of the reasons I saw a lack of challenge in WoW was that there seems to be no real death penalty. EQ2 punishes recklessness/carelessness with a shared group penalty, which I love.

My Take on 2004

[Bruha]

It was a interesting year. Horizons no long was vaporware yet has met little success. Several games came and went such as Rubies of Eventide as the eq knockoffs continue to meet difficulties garnering subscribers in the face of the MMO big 3 (EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and Star Wars Galaxies)

We saw Asian gaming hit US shores with Final Fantasy and Lineage but as with the Asian MMO culture these games resemble 1st gen MMO's at best in many aspects.

Turbine continued to drag players along with it's failed Asheron's Call 2 release. With monthly content patches mostly rebalances every month since launch only to produce a few decent patches before announcing a move to patches every 2 months. Effectively doubling the price per content push (PPCP). Doubt remains wether they can produce viable MMO's that will succeed even with big names like Dungeons and Dragons online and Middle Earth Online. The forgotten realms series supports EQ's success as much as the game itself. Middle Earth Online is late and with no Hobbit movie forthcoming as of yet there's little out there to rekindle the Lord of the Rings fever to the point that this game may succeed. I also do not see where DND online can succeed where Neverwinter Nights did not.

We also saw many successes such as World of Warcraft which is undoubtedly the best game of the year. SOE continued their fame with SWG with the jump to light speed expansion and EverQuest 2 all three of which will continue to dominate the MMO landscape in the US for the forseeable future and beyond with no apparent contender in sight.

City of Heroes

[ParadoxDruid]

I just wanted to bring up City of Heroes here for discussion.

It's an MMORPG that I think has succeeded largely by finding a different niche than most of the other offerings in the market: It's set in modern-day cityscapes with superheroes, rather than a fantasy world.

Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, it's simple and elegant: There's no equipment, what money exists is rarely useful, missions (quests) always tell you where to go with no ambiguity, and the GUI is top-notch.

After an old EQ addiction, City of Heroes is a breathe of fresh air-- I can meaningfully log on and accomplish something in half an hour, even at the high levels (I'm level 44 right now, with 50 being the cap).

Re:City of Heroes

[Phrogman]

I gotta echo the above comments. COH is a fantastic game, very well designed, very stable and (sadly) largely ignored.

I have stopped playing WOW and went back to COH. WOW was a fanstastically well designed and polished game, but it is far too solo-focused, and while almost anyone *can* solo in COH, it is a much better game for group-play. I play with a stable group of RL friends as my guild. As a result the quality of my grouping is undoubtedly far superior to that of most pickup groups and that is an advantage that not everyone can enjoy I admit, but I think the strengths of COH make it outweigh the strengths of WOW for my particular preferences.

Both are excellent games, but MMO players who haven't checked out City of Heroes really should give it a shot. It is a truely innovative game, and really pushed the genre and the industry.

I expect that all future games will end up adopting the COH Sidekicking/Exemplaring system (allows players of different levels to play with each other as if they were similiar levels - so a level 13 and a level 45 can go do a mission belonging to either player and still gain experience (well the 45 would work of exp debt when doing the 13 mission). The complete lack of any economy (effectively no drops), money (influence is similar but not quite the same), and crafting is quite refreshing. While fun, all of those things served as time-sinks, and COH is relatively free of timesinks.

You can jump into the game and accomplish something worthwhile in 30 mins, and as such its is very casual friendly. Its only major weakness is that the leveling curve is rather steep at higher levels. I expect that to change in the future - and the new difficulty slider for missions may have in fact changed it.

Re:Interview?

[I8TheWorm]

I just started playing SWG a few months ago, and I have to say, I'm having fun. Of course, the forums are filled with both whiners and satisfied people, but my guess is you get that in every game. Since joining SWG I've mastered a profession, started a couple of others, joined a guild, etc... the usual MMORPG rituals.

So I wonder, why is it you've switched to WoW and are not looking back?

Deserving a look

[TheTiminator]

Not quite sure I understand why Eve Online http://www.eve-online.com/ keeps getting overlooked. Maybe it's becuase the genre mostly aims toward cut and slash type games, or those that have huge sponsors (Sony, Lucas, etc.)? I think this one deserves a closer look by folks. Just the fact that the Eve universe is a single universe for all players, and not divided into servers or nodes, is very impressive (30,000 + solar systems for over 30,000 players). And another appealing point is the constant improvements and expansions to the game, the most recent being the Exodus expansion. I just feel that if the topic is going to be how creative and original the development process has been for a specific MMOG then Eve-Online deserves a look.

WoW player from day 1 of retail

[Guru1]

My wife and I have been playing WoW from the first day of retail. We play a few hours every night, and it's a blast. It's incredibly easy to play "casual", which is an important feature for all of us working professionals. I can't play 8 hours a day, I get a few hours after work, yet my character is progressing just fine.

It will take a few months to hit 60, then I can spend another month getting gear, then maybe I'll do some PvP. Who knows. I'm glad that I get to experience the whole game, rather than the first few levels as I would on many other MMORPGs.

As for the appeal of the game. My wife and I started, then mentioned we were playing to a friend who lives nearby. He bought the game. Over the last month or so, we've been mentioning the game to our old college friends, who have all gotten online. A couple of their wives have mentioned an interest in playing (these are women who have never played a computer game before).

My wife and I played DAoC a little, didn't get into it too much. Blizzard is very good at making very user friendly games, and I agree that it will probably do a lot for the entire field. All of these people who are playing these types of games for the first time are most likely now confident enough to try out new games in the same field.

As for complaints about the game. I'd say that most of the complaints I've heard about WoW is from the "hard core" gamers. They've complained about how easy it is to level, how much of the game is for "carebears", or those who want to play and cook dinner at the same time. I think Blizzard has hit their market pretty well. They may have sent away a few hard core gamers who will "beat" the game within a month, but in return they've caught the wives, parents, and children of those who normally wouldn't play.

Market share + growth of MMORPGs

[dannytaggart]

For some cool charts, check out this site.