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Rethinking the MMOG
Gamasutra is running a piece right now called Rethinking the MMO. Game designer Neil Sorens takes issue with some of the consistent blights on the traditional Massive gaming experience, like the phenomenon of the 'ordinary' hero, and the extremely large time investment required to 'get anywhere'. Though he doesn't offer a lot in the way of concrete solutions to these issues, his appraisal of the genre is sure to spark a few conversations: "As long as developers and publishers do nothing but copy what is successful, they--and gamers--will continue to miss out on these games' staggeringly awesome potential. And as long as [MMOGs] are designed by and for stat geeks (whom I know and love and sometimes am) with little regard for traditional game design fundamentals, they will continue to waste that potential."
I signed-up for a 14-day trial of Eve Online. As a fan of Descent, Wing Commander, and Trade Wars I thought I would love this game. After a few days I realized the game was awesome, vast, huge, addictive, and... boring. I think the problem with Eve is that it is _too_ real. I wasn't playing the game - it was playing me. To make progress, I had to spend 15-minute blocks of time watching my ship fly from point A to point B. Or watching a meter count down telling me my character completed some task like building something. *yawn*
I keep hearing that classic linear offline games are boring and limiting and going away. But that's like saying that a book is too limiting because it only has one possible outcome. With a video game or a book, I want to be the hero, I want to see the journey. I don't want to be thrown into a world where my only goal is to make money or get bigger. What fun is that? I can do that in real life.
The interesting thing about WoW is that it didn't refine it more than it dumbed it down. Everyone else was fighting to make their game more challenging, more epic in scale, and more intense graphics. Blizzard in turn made their game easier to access, smaller in scale and easier to travel due to easy transportation, and less intense graphics.
In turn they opened the door to the average Joe who always secretly though D&D and online gaming might be fun if it wasn't for the "nerds" and the amount of time it would take out of their life. They also set the system specs low enough to where anyone with a somewhat modern computer could play it. However, through this "dumbing down" (which I'm not using as a derogatory statement, I'll be the first to say that a lot of MMO's are unnecessarily difficult in a lot of respects) they alienated a lot of the original core audience of MMORPG's. For every WoW player (well, maybe not every seeing that there's so many of them) that makes an joke about EverQuest players, you can be assured that there's an EQ player that's making a crack about WoW "carebear" players.
The core problem is that you'll always have 3 core audiences: Casual players, power levelers/stat whores, and RPGers who are all looking for distinctly different gaming experiences and because of this there's never going to be the typical progression path for the genre. I think because of this, articles that talk about "rethinking the genre" have it all wrong. How do you rethink a genre that everyone wants to jump into, yet appeals (in different ways) to such a diverse audience? Do we rethink the genre or do we finally give up on trying to appeal to everybody and focus on certain core audiences? I think that's the one thing that Blizzard did get right on WoW...they went out of their way to appeal to the casual gamer. Until someone designs a game grand enough in scale to encompass a caste system to divide and account for different play styles or creates a game with seperate servers that drastically alter the game play for each type of player, I think we're better off picking a target audience and sticking with it.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
He also doesn't seem to realize that a single player RPG is very different from a MMORPG. For example:
Trust your ability to balance things later. That?s the easy part.
No. It most definitely is not. Example: I'm a relatively new member of the dev team at Eternal Lands, an open source, free (as in beer) MMORPG. Early on, the dev team had added in a sword worth an utter fortune to an NPC. It could be crafted, but took an obscenely high level to craft. Eventually (after some similar problems on a smaller scale), the devs came to the realization that once people reached that level, the market would be flooded: people would make those swords in bulk, sell them to the NPC, and completely destroy the game's economy. Fixing it got on their TODO list, but wasn't a top priority item. There was so much else to develop, and hey, nobody was near that manufacturing level yet. A minor oversight, though: you can get blessings from your god (including the manufacturing God) to temporarily up your levels -- all for just a 50 gold fee. The high level manufacturers started making and selling the swords in bulk and threw the economy out of whack.
Now it's out of whack. How do you fix it? Not only do the manufacturers now have obscene amounts of money, but through their purchases, they've messed up the amount of money that others have. Do you just roll back the entire game to a few months prior? Good way to lose almost your entire player base. It took a long time for them to rebalance the game, and they lost a number of players in the process.
In short: NEVER trust your ability to rebalance things later. That's the HARD part. Plan everything to death before you hook it in.
How come things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?
Blizzard in turn made their game easier to access, smaller in scale and easier to travel due to easy transportation, and less intense graphics. Making it accessible and dumbing it down are completely different things. An intuitive GUI is far more complex than one that is "dumbed down". I do realize you're not using that as derogatory, but it's difficult to separate the two. It's really quite complex the way they handled it. In addition, they made the interface nearly completely programmable, which allows gamers to truly geek-out and enhance their own experience.
Blizzard graphics in WoW are actually quite intense. They have their own style and incredibly complex textures. They use fewer polygons in some areas, but are not blocky because they avoid the blockiness by reducing the number of 90-degree angles. (Thus, things don't look blocky to the eye -- cf: City of Heroes.) Many small items or sections use lots of polygons to give it a "full" and complex feel even when surrounding things are relatively low poly counts.
The main gameplay thing that wow mostly eliminated was camping global spawns. If getting rid of what most people consider an utterly stupid concept is "dumbing it down" then I want to play that dumb game. Some people actually enjoyed that aspect of competition in EQ -- but most people who have outgrown pimples eschew such games. Blizzard took most of the best parts of many games, and did it right, making a fun game and hoped people would play it instead of implementing cheesy tricks to keep people playing longer. They also know their audience isn't the hardcore kid with nothing better to do than call his 20 friends when a spawn happened. It's now the somewhat richer adult, often with a wife and kids, who has a few hours here and there to play, and most importantly is willing to pony up $15/month to have fun during that time.
They also have some of the "hardcore" kind of things that others have grown to recognize, and love/hate it. I'm talking 40-man raids (recently changed to 25-man), which are difficult.
The only thing that's actually dumbed down is pvp. And even that could be changed, if they wanted, without affecting other worlds. There are actually only 2 groups of people - casuals and powergamers, and people fall between those two. PvPers are often a subset of powergamers, and RPers may be anything.
Of the three groups people you discuss, no matter what game, the casuals will always bitch about the powergamers who will always bitch about the RPers, who will always bitch (in ye olde english) about everyone who doesn't RP. But WoW actually caters to the three groups much better than other games, and I'd even say succeeds quite well. You can accomplish something as a casual, and you can accomplish something as a powergamer. And there's a little corner for thee, Master RPer. Goeth now and stand there and leaveth the rest alone