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General: Uphill! In the Snow! Both Ways!
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In her latest Player Perspectives column here at MMORPG.com, Isabelle Parsley takes on players who opine that things were 'harder' in the old days of the game, whippersnapper. But while this is sometimes true, Isabelle opines that the good old days weren't really as good as may be remembered. Check it out, take off your rose-colored glasses, and leave us a few thoughts below.
Take starter areas. WoW of course recently revamped all of its starting areas, LOTRO did it a few months back when it launched its Free to Play model, and some EQ2 areas got a facelift in the last couple of years too. Making an area, especially a starter area which is the first thing new players see, easier to handle is not a bad thing. It is a Good Thing™. I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve told me that they gave up on EQ2 after a few days because the interface was messy, quests weren’t clear, they had no idea what they were supposed to do or where they were supposed to go. This is a shame, because EQ2 has a huge amount of content to offer once you get into it. An experience like that may be gloriously difficult to some people, but in terms of an MMO’s bottom line it equates to subscriptions (or e-store sales) they could have obtained but didn’t.
Read more Player Perspectives: Uphill! In the Snow! Both Ways!.
Comments
Nice article.
I am an old school UO player, a game that pretty much threw you into a world and told you nothing. It is still the best memories I ever had of a game.
I am now a WoW player. I was finally able to set my feelings aside about how an MMO should be, which resulted in me not being able to play an mmo for more than a month or 2 for the past 8 years, to a full fledged WoW player.
All of WoW's leveling is easy, I will give anyone that. But to say that WoW is an easy game is silly. If its easy, go get top ranked in Arena and go kill the Lich King on 25 man heroic (this is an example, this is no longer that hard because of the new expansion).
My point is a good game has a casual portion and an unbelievably difficult hard portion. Its the old axiom, easy to learn hard to master that makes any game good.
Stop saying WoW is an easy game, perhaps its not the game you want to play, and thats ok. BUT its not easy by any stretch of the imagination.
Remember Old School Ultima Online
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From what I've seen, the "x" is easy mode compared to "y" thing reflects more of how solo-friendly games have become nowadays and the lack of any sort of meaningful death penality. Older games often provided quite a challenge in terms of encounter, and it wasn't because of poor coding or whatever, they required players to work a lot more together to overcome obstacles, otherwise they'd face some serious penalities (Corpse run anyone?). It also brought a much larger social aspect to the game.
This is what I believe most players mean when they talk about games being easy mode compared to older ones. Dying carried quite a few risks, and you had to prepare a lot before certain encounters or raid, while in more recent MMOs, players use dying to teleport back to their home location, and can solo a large portion of a game.
It's the consequences of the mass-market, making things easier to reach a larger audience. Is it bad? If you're on the side who wants a challenge, you'll hate everything about it. Otherwise, you'll find it to be a very positive change. But there's no denying that a lot of MMOs have taken the "easy mode" path and removed a lot of challenges that older games used to offer, and we're not talking about poor coding and such, we're talking about making encounters easiers, removing certain steps to make it easier, etc (basically dumbing down as some may call it).
There's less and less challenging MMORPGs releasing on the market, the "hardcore" niche seems to get smaller and smaller, so it's normal to see disgruntled old gamers be a bit more vocal on these things, to which I often end up agreeing with.
While there is something to be said about cleaning up UI, making quests or other mechanics less cluttered, it's still different from reducing the overall complexity.
I know that when I complain about MMOs being easymode these days, I've not refering to things such as UI enhancements, features that simply make more sense or are more straightforward. What I'm complaining about, is a genuine dumbing down of complexity and/or difficulty of certain mechanics. Things that hand-hold players through the gameplay experience, to a level where players barely even need to think or make their own decisions.
Take questing for example... Cleaning up text quest to give a more accurate explaination of where to go and what to kill or collect is one thing, this enhances the quest experience. Then there's changing the game so that the quest points out exactly on your map where to go, with an arrow pointing towards it... which is dumbing it down because as a player it gets to the point where you don't even have to read the actual quest.
I liken it to an exercise in drawing. You could ask someone to draw a picture, giving the the description of how it is supposed to look like. The person would be actively challenged to think and creatively produce the results. Alternatively, you could give someone a piece of paper with dots on it, and ask them to draw along them to connect them to produce the same picture... which is far less engaging of a task, and consequently far less rewarding to complete.
There is a genuine dumbing down of gameplay that has, and continues to, happen. The more challenging and complex something is, the more rewarding it is when you accomplish it. Whether it's picking out the right stats, reading up a quest, or finding out the right combat strategy for a combat encounter, the gratification of success is far greater when the task was harder to complete.
The sad truth of it though is that many of the players in the latest MMO gaming generation simply don't have the drive or ability to successfully accomplish more complex challenges... So developers dumb things down to their level to appease them.
With WoW in particular, I think the motivation is different. They know that the older the game is, the less people will have patience in trying to progress. At the same time they must maintain the leveling/gear treadmill. So they add more levels, then make quests easier and leveling overall faster in order to compensate. An attempt to please all at once, but it has made the game quite lifeless in a way.
One thing the game needs is to feel fresh, and a game that points out everything and no one talks about anything, is not fresh, it's stale. Bliz should have gone with a straightforward xp increase, rather than putting all the extra flight paths and quest pointers and map markers. But they took those cues from Warhammer online, feeling threatened by it, when they should not have, at least not due to that mechanic.
I started playing MMOs back with the launch of EQ.
I agree completely that people look back on memories through heavily rose-tinted glasses. People clamour for the days of forced grouping forgetting that it often lead to long periods of inactivity where nothing was possible because there simply wasn't anyone around with the same goals as you at the time.
I also agree that having basic things, like UI, or broken quests, fixed doesn't always mean the tasks get easier but that they become less frustrating. I can even understand the games that boost the leveling speed so new players can see the newest and sparkliest part of the game and not be left behind.
However, and it might just be me, games aren't becoming just more simple to access they are becoming more simple. Margins for error in most modern MMOs are so wide in most cases being asleep might not even be enough of a negative to prevent success (yes, that is an exaggeration....I think).
Whereas I can understand the cries that people must have their game accessible it sometimes seems like the games developers themselves are treating the gamers as dribbling idiots.
'Go here. Then here. Do this. Do that. Here is a map. Here is a note on the map, to save you the hassle of looking for what you need. Do you need more help little customer?'
But then, could they be blamed for doing so? We ask them to daily. MMOs have become less social and more the chase for the newest shiny object to show off. The next level to reach for. The biggest shouting match of who can get the attention of the gaming company to get their classes 'buffed', whether or not it is needed, or is best for the game.
Whilst I agree that WoW is a fun game. I cannot say it isn't an easy game. WAIT!!! Before people start frothing at the mouth...it does have difficult content. However that difficult content is usually gated by the easy, simplistic content (the stuff that at times feels like Blizz is condescendingly mocking most of their players). That even carries the assumption that people even want to try the hard modes or the high end PvP.
As has been said before though and will be said again, the 'dumbing down' draws the money and as such that is where the companies will go.
Also, back in my day we had Blizzards! Uphill! In the snow! BOTH WAYS!!
I dont think we can blame the game company for 'dumbing down' mmo's. The blame needs to be towards the players that beg for it.
I was playing an mmo game that had a hidden chest quest and if you found the chest you could receive an item (probably not the one you need, but still) It even gave you a general description of where to find it. Every minute of the game the chat was flooded by people wanting know where to find it. They couldn't be bothered to search. They apparently couldn't be bothered to actually read what the quest description said, which practically told them where it was. And of coarse people complained the location should be shown on the map, or even the great glowing trail right to it.
I don't like quest markers. That is definitely 'dumbing down' an 'super easy mode' and makes the game feel pointless. I've quit alot of mmo's thinking "any idiot can do this". No challenge=no fun. But if someone made a game that was a challenge i doubt the population would be very high.
I belive the genre has been going in the wrong direction for years, and one journalist's opinion on that doesn't change my mind at all.
Terrible article.
I think a lot of people don't appreciate that character advancement in MMOs is an illusion of progress the game provides you, especially in level-based games where each expansion is essentially a new game stacked on top of the old game. To players arriving late to a game, the low levels are just an old game from years earlier - even if its a good game, it's still not the game being played today by its fans.
At one extreme is a perfect treadmill game where level is actually a complete illusion - just a counter for how old the game is: a new level of content is added each year and an old level is decommissioned - no matter when you start, you are playing the same level as people grinding away each day for years on end.
At the other extreme is a perfectly preserved path: if the game had launched 20 years ago, you'd see a highly rated expansion come out, subscribe and be grinding through a MUD for 10 years before reaching a UO-like content for another 10 years before reaching the expansion you saw reviewed.
The middle ground is to allowed players to take a Cliff's Notes version of old content - accelerating new players through the eras to get up to the *current* game while allowing the nostalgic to take a slow road and preserving some of the illusion for old players that all those hours of grinding had meaning.
The overall complexity of games has a very similar arc as levels: new systems, new buffs and other new layers of systems are constantly being added to games. Old layers of attributes and abilities that were once important eventually become obsolete, just like how grinding through low level content eventually gets stale. The main difference is that old and new mechanics aren't usually designed to be as nicely partitioned as low level vs high level content, so streamlining tends to disrupt things more.
We are playing video games.. they are all an illusion! Also, the alternative to allowing new players to catch up is a dead game.
Remember Old School Ultima Online
Though I don't necessarily agree with everything in the article it hits the right spots in the areas that count. Its the best article I've read by Isabelle yet.
Travamars - if you don't like quest markers, ignore them ... because not having them and then putting trivia quizzes in the middle of what is essentially a walkthrough-style quest is essentially asking players to ignore that spoilers exist within a few clicks of google. And once a game has trained people that quest boxes are essentially non-game-impacting flavor text, then there's no point in mocking people for not paying attention to it. I call those "Crunchy Frog" quests in honor of Monty Python
After reading the article and the comments, I figured I'd say this. Most people seem to be focused on getting to max level asap in order to raid, pvp, or both. Some of those that do look fondly of the old days, do so, because leveling was a journey that took a long time and meant something. It meant just as much as beating raid bosses, or getting high kill counts and ranks in pvp.
For instance, Demon's Souls for the PS3 makes the entire journey worth while, even though it also has bosses for you to conquer. Each thing you kill requires you to learn how to beat it, yet then once you practice and master the techniques required to win, you blow through that portion of the levels and then do the same thing on the new creatures and bosses.
Maybe some of us DON'T want a horrendously long leveling curve/treadmill anymore, but I do think we'd all like leveling to be challenging. Perhaps maybe not in the length of time it takes to level, but in the difficulty of the mobs we are facing. So you have a quality and memorable experience leveling up (aka "an adventure or journey") and then also have some nice dungeons, raids, and pvp to take part of the rest of the time.
The simple fact is that an equal con creature in DAoC was hard to beat if you weren't paying attention, and could possibly kill you. An equal con creature in WoW, which I play, is dust beneath your feat. Even Elites of equal level are a tad easier than an equal con mob in DAoC.
It's kind of hard to ignore quest markers these days when the game automatically adds an arrow on your mini-map, marks your map, and the actual item has a huge arrow pointing down to it, or it sparkles rather obviously.
At least when the "spoilers" were confined to google, you actually had to alt-tab to look it up, and that still required a concious choice. These days there is quite literally zero thought required to do the majority of quests, let alone needing to read them. You just go in the direction the big floating arrow is pointing, and kill the highlighted mobs or collect the highlighted items.
The complaint is that so many games have gone from rewarding reading, comprehension, and problemsolving, into being nothing more than following arrows and jumping through hoops as you're told.
Or if you're one of the people who likes things dumbed down, I'll make it even more simplified...
Games have gone from requiring thought, to only requiring mindless reaction.
If quest markers exist then the games complexity and difficulty are balanced towards the assumption they will be used. Quests wont be designed around any detective or inquisitive game play so there would be no satisfaction in that technique.
If they stop serving alcohol and start selling icecream at my local pub it may become more accessible but dont expect praise from the regular drinkers.
Ultimate dumbed down starter quest.
Player: Here's my 10 rat tails. I followed the red arrows and killed them all by myself.
NPC: Congratulations, you have proven yourself master of the Universe and receive the honor of carrying Sword of Kings. I now advance you to level 100.
NPC: Oh, and here's a cookie.
In the end... old, new, tough, or easy... it's just a game. Beyond that, perception of it is subjective based on the tastes of the observer. As gamers, some of us don't like the direction the industry is taking. Fact is, the industry doesn't give a rat's tail what we think. Publishers want revenue and will do anything they can do get it.
One problem is that the writer hasn't actually played these games. To compare the Cataclysm new player experience to the Orc Hill in EQ1 and think that the difference is is in the interface is at best ignorant.
Easy mode means that the game is so easy that there's no sense of accomplishment. The PVE in WoW is so easy now, that you have to try to do stupid things to die. I rolled up a undead hunter and he didn't come close to dieing until level 18, when I ran into a pack of elite worgen. Before that I was able to easily solo an elite ettin two or three levels higher than my character. If you can play the game and watch TV and carry on a chat conversation... YOU'RE IN EASY MODE.
That's easy mode. For people with close to average potential and above, it is satisfying to achieve something difficult (not I am not saying grinding monsters). When you make a game that is so easy that there is no challenge, that takes away the "Fun" you seem to equate to advancing rapidly. If we carry this bizzare thought pattern out to it's conclusion, the most fun MMORPG would be one where you get a starter sword, walk out, slay a wolf, return to a quest giver, and you reach maximum level with the best gear possible. Wow, that would be fun, wouldn't it? Just imagine the sense of accomplishment you get from that!
[Mod Edit]
New gamers have been raised on simple console and facebook games (farmville). The fact is, the new gamer cant handle or doesnt want complexity.
Old School Gamers (like me) grew up watching the industry evolve and grow. We know see it stagnate out of necessity.
I have to admit that lately I've been less and less satisfied with the ways games have been going. But, as the author alludes to in this piece, it's mostly about ME changing, and not so much about the games.
A few months ago, I started working out. Finally started working on leveling MY OWN character. So far, I've lost 56 pounds, and it oddly doesn't feel like 'a grind' yet. I still have subscriptions to a couple games, and log in, but the thrill I used to get in games five years ago I'm now getting in the gym. The game thing is more out of habit than any true enjoyment nowadays. Sure, I'll always be a gamer, and will always be looking for that next great MMO. But I have to admit that if I keep getting disappointed with all the new releases, it may not have much to do with the cookie-cutter, lowest-common-denominator state of the industry right now. Might just be that I changed enough that this crap just doesn't do it for me any more, no matter how much I want it to.
I agree that a lot of it has to do with me changing as well. DAOC was my first MMORPG, and I spent just as much time learning MMORPG mechanics and the limits of those mechanics and the world I adventured in as I did actual adventuring. The genre was new to me, playing in a world that seemed enormous at that time, and not knowing the mechanics lent that newness that we all miss. Since I've been playing MMORPG's for so many years now, I can jump into any game and instantly know the mechanics, UI, and how to adventure. All that's left these days for me to learn is how to overcome the mobs I'm fighting and how to get places. Now when a game makes killing mobs real easy, and rely on quests that aren't interesting compared to using quests that reads like a story and lasts you the majority of the game, such as the new WoW expansion and what SWTOR is trying to do, it takes the last challenge a game can offer to players experienced in the genre. It becomes the same game, no matter the title, just a new coat of paint.
I dunno, it seems that previous articles by the author were well thought out, in depth, reasonable in their approach and came from a fairly fair and balanced perspective.
This article definitely seemed dumbed down and more along the lines of the other authors who focus on ranting.
Just my opinon of course.
But yeah yeah, everything we vets of gaming (curmudgeons if you will) is totally seen through our nostalgia rose colored glasses and except for we few, everyone is totally happy with the direction most modern MMO's have gone.
Oh wait... no they aren't.
No matter what people think, for every WOW player currently subscribed, I'll bet there's at least 2 who are no longer happy and have quit and moved on.
(and btw, I'm currently a WOW player)
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Im a new generation gamer. I like the new games. They have a hard content to today even though most of you guys will never admit to it. I have a friend who goes really hard on raiding in WoW doing the hard modes and they are really hard. Most of you wont admit to it but the bosses really challenge you especially the Cata ones he was telling me.
See I think WoW is reasonable. Im not has hardcore as my buddy. I get to quest in the outside world and relax doing quests that arent taxing but enjoyable. He gets to go into heroic raids where one mistake by one player means wipe. He enjoys it I enjoy it. There something for everyone.
I dont really care about difficulty. I picked up WoW at like 12-13 years old cause I saw you could be an undead rogue. I didnt know about raiding or anything and just ran around the world gleefully doing the quests having way too much fun. I never really thought of difficulty. Strangely enough I had the most fun in Kara in BC. That instance will never fade in my heart never! I guess to have hard things does make a videogame fun but you people single it out waaaaaaaaaaaay too much. Its just another element that needs to be added to the pot and blend in well with the other ingredients of a MMO. As I see it WoW is just adding more, or subtracting less now in an effort to get it just right and in this process of trying to achive the perfect dish,MMO , there are going to be a few failed experiments and crys of anguish.
Really no point in responding, though I have a few free minutes so why not waste the time. Fairly clear, as grimfall mentioned, that this person wasn't around for those old games. That's not to say they didn't have their bad parts: name an MMO that doesn't. It's just blatantly clear from the subject matter of this "article" that the author doesn't get what those old timers are talking about and in an effort to just "say something" she grabs an opinion from left field and lobs shots that hit all the trivial negative points that the old schoolers did indeed want changed anyway. Typical rant in that instead of doing actual research and talking with these folks to get a true understanding she just takes a general arguement and blasts away.
Kyleran also hit the target with his comments as usual.
As I said at the beginning, though, no point in trying to funnel accurate information toward the author as I highly doubt she will come back and read the responses much less make a genuine effort to correct the misinformation she shoulders as fact.
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Wow ... thanks for this "Thought provoking" conversation. You condescendingly (and childishly) insult the intelligence of any reader who holds a contrary opinion while at the same time put forth a completely egotistical and onanistic OPINION as fact which allows for absolutely no possibility of introspection or compromise. How very mature, how very refined, ... how very "streamlined" of you.
Did Richard Aihoshi get a sex change or something?
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Good article. I agree completely.