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General: Why Not Make The Journey Fun?
Dana
Member Posts: 2,415
In this week's edition of Dana Massey Asks "Why Not?" he wonders why MMOs have never been able to get away from this mad dash to the end-game at the expense of everything in between. It's time to make MMOs fun from start to finish and Massey offers a theory on how it can be done.
Check back each Thursday, except next week when Dana will be at E3, to catch a new edition of "Why Not?"
A fundamental assumption of Warhammer Online had to have been that players would fight each other for their realm, their guild, their honor and… wait for it… FUN!
Wrong.
Players have been so conditioned to maximize experience and run for the endgame that no one gives a crap about fun anymore, and for those of us who are not mindless automatons, it’s becoming a serious problem.
Read the column here.
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
Comments
Two things I hate in MMOs Levels and Gated content.
This dude is spot on.
Make everything useful and fun.
The journey is the game.
This is why I play Open ended games.
Playing: EvE, Ryzom
To add to your list...they should never remove content and items...they need to add. It should be a PERSISTENT WORLD.
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Ten Golden Rules Of Videogame Fanboyism
"SOE has probably united more gamers in hatred than Blizzard has subs"...daelnor
To add to your list...they should never remove content and items...they need to add. It should be a PERSISTENT WORLD.
gotta love how people talk of the future of MMOs and the way they should be when I've been playing Open ended games like that since UO.
UO, SWG, EVE, Ryzom lol.
Edit: in the article the writer spoke of a main storyline leading a player from zone to zone, with optional quests and fun things to do all around and being able to come back to a earlier area and having it meaningful. Yeah that game is called Guild wars. You can level to 20 (level cap) before you see 10% of the main storyline once done with main storyline you can switch on hardmode where the map is 100% useful.
I almost feel like everyone has started playing MMOs post WoW and forgot how MMOs were before lol. It's like the freaking twilight zone on this site.
Playing: EvE, Ryzom
Great post.
Always knew there was something wrong with most current MMOs, but you just put the finger right on it.
Thank you for the blog, I'll make sure to forward it to some WoW sheep friends.
I really think most of this is caused by a couple of things:
(1) Poor content design.
Really, quests in MMO are near assinine. Why? They have no impact on the world. I don't really care about the lore, but I know that if Herr Bearkiller needs 10 pieces of bear jerky to live, he's just going to need the same 10 pieces from the next schlub that comes along. I also know that if I don't feed his starving carcass, he'll still be there when I come back again. So why would I care anything about his story/lore/or what not other than an XP perspective. The only aspect of my game experience that changed would be some arbitrary number. He's the same whether or not he tells me his perscribed bit of content. He's the same whether or not I accept his stupid collect X quest.
(2) Some people need to compensate for other things.
Wink wink nudge nudge. Everyone has to have a bigger E-Peen. Look at all the SWG vets that complain years after their game was changed. When you corner one and get to the heart of his argument, it comes down to they had grinded level after level to become a Jedi and then BAM, everyone was. Sure there is more areguments there, but that's the core of why people need to race ahead. We don't like to see people better than us. No one wants to be the wimpy kid that gets sand kicked in their face when Uber McPlaysalot comes along with his raid gear that he's collected over two decades of play. Additionally, those same types are the ones on the boards who talk about how they soloed their own 25 man raid and can kill <insert mob> while playing the bagpipes and watching Sandord and Son reruns. It seems to be an inherent trait of MMOs that people have to talk about how uber they are. Still it is one of the last bastions where the unemployed social pariah has a distinct leg up in society. Want to run a raid on Friday night? Sure! I'm in!
(3) MMOs are terrible PvP games, yet people do it anyway.
This is kind of a corralary to #2, people for some reason want to do PvP in a MMO... why? Beyond the class imbalances, power imbalances, lag, item imbalances, and who knows what other problems, people still want to PvP/Duel or whatnot. So it kind of makes sense that if you are going to do that you want every edge you can get (see #2). Yet if you really want PvP, and want to talk about mad skills then play something like Counter Strike or Crysis or anything that time/money don't determine the outcome.
(4) Everyone has to have the best.
It doesn't matter if getting the best ruins the game for you. It's they best. You have. to. have. it. To not have it implys that you are not the best (see #2). Far to many of us have been treated like precious snowflakes all our life and the words you can't have it or wait for it really don't enter the equation all that often (fellow American's I'm really looking at you here... see credit crunch for proof). So if the best is at the end, then please step aside Mr. EscortMeToAZone, I'm coming through and I don't have time to read why you need to get somewhere. There's some shiney loot at the end of this XP tunnel with my name on it.
So there you have it. Why don't I care about the delectable tidbits devs toss into games?
* They don't matter
* They slow me down from being uber
* If I'm not uber I can't win PvP bouts
* I need the best and the best is at the end
I kinda thought his idea is what TOR is shooting for. You advance through story which is an interesting concept. It seems like it would work just as well as GTA or other games but as usual until you see what they are really doing you never know.
The journey does indeed need to be fun. More importantly, however, it needs to be meaningful.
EQ and DAoC had meaningful leveling journeys. Now, of course, its rather boring and pointless. The plethora of changes has disinegrated any meaning out of leveling except to bore you to tears. Every game is like this now. Kill 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000 rats and boars, and do 100000000000000000000000 same old quest. NO THANKS, GUYS AND GALS.
Easiest way is making a single player RPG then adding the multiplayer for people to cooperate or do other activities together (which is almost basically a RPG with co-op). (Guildwars except quest progression is necessary?)
The thing in MMOs is players compare, interact and contest with each other which makes one wanting their character at their best to match other player's ability of fun so then playing together is more fun.
Funny I dislike level based games. While I do have to put up with them, it is not a feature that excites me. Probably because I started in UO and then moved on to SWG until they encorporated levels and ruined the game. Eve is about the only game right now that offers choice, every other game out there locks you into rigid class/leveling systems that strictly cater to the "I want it now" audience.
I was disgusted with AoC because so many hit end cap within a month.
Guess I am different because of my backround because I never rush to end cap. I enjoy plodding through the quests and exploring.
Seems a shame that MMO developers are abandoning the best part of playing a game.
The Warhammer Online folks tried to make the journey more interesting by having two types of advancements, Rank and Reknown, the theory being that players could diverge from one source to the other, thus playing it their own way.
But the only thing to do in War is fight, so one way or the other boils down to the same thing. Without some other game feature or more dynamic control of the game world in a way that really helps your side out and punishes the enemy, players could be forgiven for losing the point of it entirely.
I don't think its fair to chastise players for forgetting their sense of fun. The game must at least provide a context for the fighting, and the although the great struggle to eventually topple the enemy's capital is good in theory, its bloody hard to feel it in game when you're smacking squigs over the head for some reason.
You'd have to define your game world with more than a single activity to make advancement more interesting. Earth and Beyond had three types of experience: combat, exploration and trade. They might have been grinds but they were three different types of grind, and although they weren't balanced very well, they encouraged you to make the most of what the game had to offer. Exploration in particular, showed the player that prying into every part of the gameworld would be rewarded. The xp gains for exploration in most games are usually trivial.
Incidentally, why is trading only ever a feature of Elite-inspired space sims? You'd think it would work just as well in fantasy mmos.
How about if the reward of all the main quests in a game were to unlock a skill/spell? Irrevocable character development choices, like picking a subclass, would certainly make people pay attention, and compete to achieve at the earliest opportunity.
The problem here is simple: Fun is different for everyone. Hence all of the inane arguments that we are subjected to while sifting through the forums, hoping for a small glimpse of intelligence and real thought.
WIth this statement I can see you have strong feelings about intelligence and real thought, or the lack thereof, on these forums. Maybe not so much about the topic at hand, though.
The problem is simple, I agree. There are a lot of disgruntled MMO players, hence all the topics in the forums that we are subjected to while seeking a small glimpse of intelligence and real thought. A lot of us are just not happy mindlessly killing boars, so that we can start the endgame. We want a game that we can play, and have fun from the beginning. Instead we are subjected to repetitive, meaningless content.
WIth this statement I can see you have strong feelings about intelligence and real thought, or the lack thereof, on these forums. Maybe not so much about the topic at hand, though.
The problem is simple, I agree. There are a lot of disgruntled MMO players, hence all the topics in the forums that we are subjected to while seeking a small glimpse of intelligence and real thought. A lot of us are just not happy mindlessly killing boars, so that we can start the endgame. We want a game that we can play, and have fun from the beginning. Instead we are subjected to repetitive, meaningless content.
Asheron's Call was like that.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/Bleakmage
Excellent post and spot on as always.It seems that Bioware and 38 studios up coming MMO are both trying to make the journey matter and fun.But until we know more and see the game running we won't know for sure.
In the land of Predators,the lion does not fear the jackals...
great article. it really does express what a lot of us feel about MMOs....
reminds me of the old SWG and even of Tabula Rasa too (fun quests that never seemed to end)
i also agree that with the current released content for TOR, sure seems like they are heading in a direction of quest oriented progression.
We shall see!!
Playing:
CS:S, Waiting to try out TOR.
Played: Sword of the New World, Infantryzone, Ragnarok Online,RF Online, Fury, Tabula Rasa, Star Wars Galaxies, Cosmic Rift....
I know personally in City of Heroes/Villains what has really turned me off of PvP is partially the people who seem to be better at it act like "i amn supar 733t" and call those who prever the PvE side as "carebears" when the fact that some of us just know our limitations
what was the point of this article?
I skipped to the end to get my Epic-Mount
Unfortunately, thanks to WoW, this is all we'll see in the industry for at least another decade.
EQ started it, but Blizzard has elevated the carrot-on-a-stick level system to an art form. It's pretty obvious the way they are trying to rush new players through by making it faster. And then, come next expansion, all the latest stuff will be obsolete, so you'll have to rush to the level cap again!
Ugh. I play WoW, and I get a headache just thinking about being level 80.
The level cap is only level 80
PSSSSSSSSSSAH
Last i checked The Realm had well over 1,000 levels, i think even a few over 5,000
Freedom
Fear
Satisfaction
To avoid feeling frustrated, you have to be free (i.e., no false boundaries or being railroaded through linear tutorials or quest lines.)
To respect something, you have to fear it somewhat. The dungeon is only going to be exciting if it is fearful (i.e., foreboding setting and a significant penalty for dying.)
To value something, you have to work for it. Free or easy loot has little value and commands little respect.
No journey is ever fun unless you have the above factors.
Well played... well played...
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
Don't you get it? This is the type of thing the article was talking about. Blizzard isn't trying to "rush" players through the game. It's just that the players decide to rush through the content whether Blizzard wants them to or not. So, Blizzard makes leveling easier to keep power-leveling down [some], and to make people's lives generally easier. Blizzard is just trying to cater to the customer base. Afer all, it would be in Blizzard's best interest [or any mmo company] to slow down the leveling process, because the longer leveling takes, the longer people will be playing, and the more money the company would make. The gaming companies are actually just trying to do right by their customers by making games more accessable and take less time to achieve things However, I think the companies are also contributing to their customers bad habits.
Now, I'm not saying leveling should be slower, I'm just saying all of the companies should be trying to steer the customers away from the rush to cap mentality. People think, "there's no End Game to this mmo"! Or other such nonsense. Really, it's just that people decided to power through 3 months of content in 3 weeks. So, people sit at capped level and whine that there's "nothing to do", meanwhile they're already playing a game. [How do you get "bored" while doing something?] If it were me, I'd just let the people keep crying. Of course, devs probably like having subscriptions and earning money. That is why I would NEVER work in a service industry. People are just goons.
What Happened With SWG Went Down YEARS AGO! Please Try To Stop Whining About It In Every Thread I Read. Mourn It, And Finally MOVE ON With Your Lives! Thanks A Heap.
From what the developers are saying, both TOR and The Secret World seem to be trying for this type of approach. Of course we all know many promised features often fall to the wayside before release. I can only hope they see it through and deliver on their intentions.
Personally I like the way Asheron's Call handled it. Except for skill points gained when you reached certain levels, the game relied mostly on the development of skills. Use the skills...and exp goes towards the skill itself and some went to a general experience pool you could spend on any skill you had.
You could remove the levels altogether and put skill points in as rewards to various quest lines.
Darkfall Online uses a skill based system that uses skill usage to raise the skill, not as flexible but it can be fun. There is a grind though to using specific skills to raise them up...and they cap at 100 point each. In Asheron's Call it was a soft cap...costing more and more experience to raise a skill. I had a character that had a run and a jump skill that was into the 300's, unbuffed. City of Heroes reminds me of that when I use Super Leaping, or Super Speed. Of course the character was not as good at other things but it was fun jumping halfway across a village or jumping up 2 stories or a little more.
I would think a game with a skill/exp system like Asheron's Call combined with a strong storyline would be good to start as a game. But, the content at a more personal level could be made just that, more personal. What if, you introduced a little fuzzy logic into the NPC world. In some games you had NPC's that seemed to operate in their own little world but they were regimented by the internal clock of the game. What if the NPC's operated with a small random number generator that would vary their response times and combined with that have dependencies on their actions based on the proximity of other NPC or players of a specific alignment or fame, adding randomness to the way the world works. Some quests only appear when certain conditions occur, some conditions obvious, some not, and I don't refer to just a simple condition such as level...in this case might be better referred to as fame.
Right now, most all quests in games are available if you match a few brief criteria and you complete it...simple binary result...and you fail, you redo it. Why not make multiple result quests based on how you complete it and the system remembers the result...and in theory you could have certain results of completing or not completing a quest causing the NPC to no longer appear for the player, if you ended up killing the quest giver or otherwise made them cease to exist for you. That would be a little tricky to handle in an MMO situation, but not impossible.
Anyway, ultimately I think the original article is correct in the way the developers and playerbase have crafted themselves into this treadmill system of gaming. I apologize if I rambled a bit with ideas I think that might help the games...but I think it comes down to making the game more personal to the player and not always the static cookie cutter world that it presently used...to ensure everyone has essentially the exact same experience. Heck using an itemization system like Asheron's Call would help since the loot was randomized...even two swords of the same name would have a certain amount of randomness to the statistics.
The real question is, what kind of gameplay makes more money for the publishers / devs. If removing levels from the game will make some gamers happy but these gamers are not the majority of gamers, then all you're doing is making a niche MMO. So sure, if that percent of gamers is large enough, that could work to make a sustainable game, but it still won't be a hugely successful MMO.