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Is there too much focus on "End Game"?
GeezerGamer
Member EpicPosts: 8,857
I was just reading in the thread discussing how WildStar is struggling. I'm left thinking that it's a sharp contrast to the games that have come before it. in terms of End Game approach. Other games were criticized for not having enough End Game content at cap. It is what accounted for the high initial populations that very quickly dropped to a fraction of that within the 1st 2-3 months post release.
But then we see Wildstar enter with a strong focus on End Game content yet, the same result. A sharp drop off in game population after a short time.
I had always believed the issue was that these current games lacked enough viable options in activities for players to engage in. I still do, but now, I am also looking at a list of games, such as, WoW, EQ 1 and 2, FFXIV, SWTOR, Rift, and WildStar and I am asking, what's the difference here? Why did Vanilla WoW and EQ seem to hold on to their player base for years instead of months? My only answer now is the leveling experience. Back when it took the months for most to reach cap. Recent games have players capping in a week now. That was unheard of before.
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here is my theory about end game.
MMOs basically has its roots in pen and paper RPG games. In such games progress is one of the cornerstones. The idea of an 'end game' in table top really doesnt exist. In fact the concept is a bit absurd and goes against much of the principles of pen and paper.
In the computer version of RPGs (MMOs) over time the focus seems to have shifted toward the end game and I believe this has happend for one of a few possible reasons.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
Maybe it's not and has never been a singular issue that causes declines?
Maybe those games aren't or never were actually doing poorly?
Maybe there's just a large amount of people who play MMO's just as they do any other genre, while those who play them as MMORPGs, are still just a small portion of the overall gaming community, hence numbers end up in the same range they have always been in for most games?
These maybes are the problem with trying to convince yourself there's one major issue with a certain game.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
OK, I never meant to imply they were doing poorly. Just that they launched with higher populations that dropped off shortly after.
Maybe I should have acknowledged games like SWTOR having gotten them back, and that FFXIV really doesn't fit well in that list as it seems to have maintained retention.
I am just questioning if there is a real connection to the time it takes to level to cap and MMO retention rates. This of course assumes that the game's leveling content is strong enough for it.
I think that the problem is more toward 'hard caps' as a method of time gating content seen in both FF14 and Wildstar lately. In both games once you hit the cap, you pretty much cap out your tokens and 'essentially' your week is done.
The other avenue of end game progression is usually raiding, but that may not be for everyone, or for those that do, raiding is enough to get yourself capped out in the first place which limits the amount of 'useful' play time there is, since you can effectively kill two birds with one stone.
I won't deny that things are faster to level now since the days of EQ. Times have changed and unfortunately there is the expectation of faster progression now. Maybe developers will one day make a game in that the journey is as good as the destination. But for the time being, the destination is more important.
What I would like to see games taking and doing for end game progression is an AA system similar to EQ, and applying it to the end game process. Give players measurable ways to always improve their characters aside from gear, give them something to work towards. The 'end-game' of every game should be something that is impossible to be completed through the sheer quantity of things to do. Not from hard caps, or artificial barriers to play.
Wildstar's "problem" (it's not really a problem) is that they knowingly targeted a niche group of players. A group that other games have already identified as a tiny tiny fraction of their player bases and have since avoided catering to them.
WS may have lots of end game focus, but it's made for that tiny niche who wants themepark hardcore 40 man raid content. That's who they wanted to attract, and they did. Great success.
I'd be willing to bet that if WS had instead gone with a softer, inclusive and modular end game model, they would have easily attracted more people and retained more people as well. Too late now, first impressions are difficult to shake, just ask Age of Conan.
"Progression" has to be more than a number next to your character frame, that makes you stronger based on the amount of pointless 3 min task you do.
Levels in table top have not translated well in mmorpgs. Well they haven't aged well. When I think back, I thought about levels a lot when playing pen & paper rpgs, but those levels didn't mean much. They weren't all restricting.
It was the skills that I liked. Different ways of doing things, or just the ability to do things in general. I think a lot of the newer not so successful mmorpgs have went away from this concept for the sake of less work balancing, debugging, creating, ect. It's much easier to focus on levels to keep people in game until they spend money (sub, cs, w/e) and repeatable endgame content. This is why they are failing imo.
First while EQ was all the rage for its time it would be considered a niche game, if not a failure, by today's subscriber standards. WoW was lightning in a bottle, the right IP at the right time with the right design. Nobody has come close since and nobody will as long as they continue to emulate rather than innovate. Sure WoW borrowed a lot from other games, but Warcraft had its own particular style and uniqueness that Blizzard did a superb job translating into a multi-player experience. Not too many MMO's have had such a strong stand-alone fandom to draw from and those few who have since did a very poor job recapturing that feeling in an MMO (I'm looking at you ESO).
I don't think you can create a recipe for a successful MMO. Many have tried and many have failed because it takes more than the desire to make a successful game or to make money. You have to really know the game you're making and the audience you're making it for. It doesn't matter if you're making a car, a game, or a cupcake if you don't absolutely love that which you are creating you will never make it as good as someone who does.
My overall point was more about the crowds that flock to new games in and of themselves. I really do not think these folks are your average MMO player for the most part. Hence why I think they tell a bad story about retention rates.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
When I look back at the games I have enjoyed over the years, one that comes to the forefront is Anarchy Online. What was so amazing about AO was gearing up wasn't based on levels. Later on in it's life, FunCom added level restricted gear, but by and large, the stuff that made you stronger wasn't.
Implants for example. Oh how I loved tweaking those, and "laddering" them in. The restriction on implants was stat requirements. You wanted to put in an implant that increased your ability to use pistols? Well, that meant you needed to have a certain level of a base stat like STR, Stam or DEX to equip it. So the game became about temporarily buffing your base stats as high as you possibly could to ultimately equip a very powerful implant given your current level. It became both a science and an art. LOL. Those who were really good at it were able to produce some very expensive and at the same time very powerful low level twinks and they'd use them to solo content that is normally difficult for 6 man groups of higher levels but average gear builds.
I personally don't think it's an issue of gated content or too much focus on end game content. I actually think that Destiny has a really good idea with their progression system. So it's 20 levels (so a day to week of content for most), but has add-on levels (kinda like D3 paragon levels I suppose?). Their focus is on the end game content and I think it's a good strategy. Wildstar even had the right idea.
The real question is, if you're going to focus on something like End Game content, then why even have level progression? This is where I think that companies are missing the point. We have so many options out there these days that when we think about going through that levelling process for something like, say, LOTRO which has 90 levels or whatever. Bah! Can't be bothered! I'm currently trying to level up my final tank class character through WoW. I'm at level 83 right now (sooooo close!!!). The problem is that it's such a time sink, and it's not a fun one, really. I think about the progression system in WoW and how it might take me 3 or 4 days of play time to level up. Comparatively, it's pretty short to what it used to be, but still, that 3-4 days, for me, ends up being a month or two, or three depending on my playtime that month.
I think the old idea was to provide a long enough journey in order to prevent people from leaving. However, Destiny is much more accountable for their own success now, which I really appreciate. It's basically B2P with paid DLC. My assumption is that they'll focus less on level progression and more on gear progression. They are saying that they want people to be able to just pick up and play with their friends. I think this is the right idea. Just think about how many OTHER MMOs you'd play if you could just jump in, buy some credits in-game, buy some decent gear to get you going, and be able to jump in and start playing with your friends. I'd probably play 7 or 8 games at once if that was the case. As it is, it's just too time consuming.
Crazkanuk
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I'd say actually there's not enough focus on it and that earlier games had more focus on it.
Having a focus on end-game doesn't mean it should be easy to get there. On the contrary, it means it should be an achievement to get there. If end-game's the most important thing in your game then your players also need to feel that it's important. One way of achieving that is to make it take great amounts of time to get there.
If your game has a focus on something then there needs to be challenge and investment there. It could be challenge, end-game's incredibly hard and take skill and practice. It could be time, end-game takes a long while to reach and progress in. It could be social, end-game takes big guilds or lots of friends etc.
Lots of ways to make it count. And I think the error recent games are making is that end-game's too easy in all matters. Players don't have to invest in end-game or anywhere else in the game. And if you invest nothing then there's nothing keeping you with the game once the initial shine has worn off.
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Simple answer to your question: Why was WoW and EQ able to hold onto players for years instead of months?
Timing and density of playerbase.
WoW and EQ were born into a market of very few competitors. They had little competition, and they hit the market with an engine that most computers could run the game. It attracted curious people into the genre that didnt know what an MMORPG was about, and had nothing else to compare it to.
Fast-forward 5 to 9 years and those people have been playing MMOs(mostly WoW at this point) for all of these years. Blizzard conditioned these folks into how their MMO is and thats the holy grail. Now, when a new kid on the block comes, Wildstar, people look at it with WoW eyes or EQ eyes and compare. They eventually leave and either leave MMOs or go back to their roots.
So WoW had little competition in their hayday and had the opportunity to garner MANY subs, loyalty, and had years to develop a reputation as a standard for the genre. A game like Wildstar, as good or bad as it may be, won't see the 8 million subs. Ever. Even if I love the game. Its lucky to get 1 mil. Why? Because most people in the mmo genre are still playing WoW, and everyone else in the genre is spread too thin throughout GW2, Wildstar, ESO, Rift, Tera, Neverwinter, Eve, etc.
As I said, timing and density.
There have been big IP's that fell flat because the developers or whoever was calling the shots didn't allow a great product to be made.
Warhammer - Come on now, huge IP, rabid fanbase, should have been a huge hit. Even the first Warcraft (Orcs v Humans) was created by Blizzard for Games Workshop who rejected it because it was "too limited" to represent the war game. Oh well.
Age of Conan - One of the most famous fantasy heros with a ton of supporting lore and world design all set to go. But they botched it with technical issues and lack of content.
SWTOR - To show you how strong the Star Wars IP is, the game is pretty pathetic and yet is doing incredibly well in terms of players and finances. Star Wars is an IP that could have easily blown away Warcraft. Warcraft is known to gamers, Star Wars is known to everyone and their unborn children's children.
LOTRO - Just like Star Wars, if there was an IP that should have been massively successful in the FANTASY RPG genre, it was LOTRO. The fantasy world that invented the modern fantasy genre should have done a bit better imo. But the effort was not good enough.
STO - Like Star Wars, Star Trek is . . . hmmm. . . how shall we say, insanely popular. The game could have been so many things, and so much better, but lack of vision kills another big IP.
TESO - Another big gaming IP which just came off the back of a very successful SRPG, and I'll be honest, it's almost everything I want, but they need more varied content for Veteran levels.
I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking WoW was not lightning in a bottle. It was that WoW took something popular and successful (EQ) and adjusted it to what gamers wanted and since then they keep making adjustments. The formula is simple, take the most successful game, improve upon it. The difficulty rests in the execution and the patience of doing it properly. The moment accounting calls and says, "We need to get this game out the door NOW!" is the moment that game just failed.
For example, if you're going to have endgame PvP, it should be mimicked on a smaller scale throughout the leveling process. Introduce the larger mechanics piece by piece. "Auto-leveling" is a shit system in which lower level players engage in endgame PvP, and does nothing good for the leveling process.
I played AO for two years and never reached level cap, ok I was close. In today's games you go so quickly that there isn't an intermediate game to be played at all. AO had a complexity to it that allowed for game play to be meaningful while leveling. The slow leveling curve was only part of it. I would not relish a modern game if it contained the kind of grind AO had. Too much time spent for very little fun. But I would like meaningful levels prior to reaching max. All games now seem like a race to the end. I don't think you can have a meaningful level experience if it only takes a week or even a couple of months to get to max level. Certainly part of the problem is the customers, they want to "win" and one way to do that is to get to max level.
No wonder there is such a big focus on end game but this means there are fewer options for game play. Take low level or mid level dungeons. I think it is a waste of time in modern games to have them. By the time you have farmed the unique items in the mid-level dungeon they are totally useless to you. You can run it once for fun but it seems like a lot of effort for one off content. Continuing with AO there were actually reasons a higher level might want to run a low level dungeon one reason was to get gear that would help you fit into other gear. Another was pocket bosses a sort of treasure hunt, craft, kill, and farm for gear mechanic. I think this type of complexity could be build into a modern game.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
The major flaw with MMOs is the gear grind mentality... the crazy notion that you can't play the game unless you have the very best gear in game... well I hate to tell you this, but you didn't have the best gear in game when you defeated whatever to get it. Why in the hell would you farm for gear, because some developer wants you to? You remove gear from the game, what is left?
True and true. Blizzard definately had their finger on the pulse of the MMORPG community up until pandas. But it started with "right place and right time". Being able to build off of that amount of subs in the first two years is 100x more adventageous than anything a developer like Carbine or Zenimax can think of today. It has allowed them to foster a loyal playerbase as well as a good reputation.Yeah, I love their IP's, but we can't ever get anything good from them. Oh well, here's hoping to WH40K EC, I enjoyed Space Marine so maybe this one might be fun.
If I had never played an MMO before, pretty much any of them would be cool enough to hold my interest. But I've been playing computer RPGs for more than 20 years. I no longer enjoy leveling up characters and killing 20 monster, collecting 10 of this and taking them to quest dude in the next town just to get xp so I can level up so I can do the same thing with bigger numbers. For example, I'm trying out ArcheAge. I am tired of the leveling/questing/killing npc part. But I am find the farmville and exploration stuff interesting. I find even more intriguing the promise of siege warfare (although I haven't tried it yet). I played GW2 and thought WvWvW was pretty awesome (it just needed a few different maps, playing the same thing over and over did get kind of old).
If anything I'd say there's too much focus on the treadmill aspects of these games. The non-treadmill parts can be quite fun and those are the parts that should get more focus going forward.
I believe it actually mainly happened for a couple of reasons you didn't list:
-As content creation costs went up devs sought a way to keep many players grinding the same content over and over. In the leveling process people wanted new zones and areas to explore but for whatever reason at "endgame" people seemed content to grind the same instances over and over making this sort of design very attractive to devs.
-Lately, level cap has become something everyone assumes they will reach in a couple of weeks of casual play in any MMO. Many people have become convinced that actually taking months or years to do it or *gasp* never reaching max level at all is way too grindy since many have been indoctrinated that real game starts at endgame and levelling is just a task you need to suffer through to get to the real game (No reason it has to be that way but that's how many games are designed now).
-The other reason is to keep new players excited, devs started giving players huge gaudy power increases when leveling (Level 2? Well now you can hit for 200 damage!) Increase it to where at level 100 people may be hitting for 50000 damage. This was a very dumb design choice which makes it so a character can not group with or fight anyone not near their level. If you want a game with many more levels or no level cap you have to make incremental power creep per level much much smaller than it currently is in modern MMOs. A high level character should be better than a new character but he shouldn't be a living god that can sneeze and blow the new character over. You also need way more horizontal progression.
In conclusion I'd really like to see MMORPGs do away with level caps but they need to be redesigned from the ground up to accomplish that.
Back in Ultima Online people would macro all day to get thier stats up so they could PVP. Of course back then that was where the real fun was, even when you were just walking in forest and a dude would jump out and fight you. Man those were the days when you almost jumped out of your chair (let alone skin) when the dude did that. There was more shock and surprise in those days. Like when about 50 level one's went and took this big bad dude out, stole his house key and made him regret being that tough big bad ass.
Now it is like people have to be lead to end game and act a certain way when they get there. Maybe there is no more surprise in these games like we found so exciting back then.
Or maybe the adventure like it was in UO, EQ, AC with crafting and exploring. maybe we have lost a lot of those players. The youngun's these days want it all NOW, they don't want to explore, they want the most gold and the best stats by end of week. Which is why so many gold sellers are out there.
Maybe before I die they will find the right formula that creates the perfect game. But they better hurry I may only have like 20 years left. :-D
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Agreed. GW2 could have been...ugh. Amazing. But thats a topic for another day. WvW is still fun, but I agree with you.
Wildstar...amazing game IMO. I simply dont have the time to invest in traditional end game.
ESO, for all its bugs and launch issues, might be the new game for me. Played beta, it was OK. But with no focus on raiding and a huge world of tamriel to explore, maybe I can have some fun.
Keeping an eye on EQN and Archeage. Hopefully Archeage has no element of traditional end game in it and is a land version of Eve online. But...I might be wasted on MMOs now. Might be time to play a few shooters casually, maybe some crappy looking minecraft, and look toward retiring my PC gaming days. Kids are going to grow up soon, vacations, house projects...Im 30 years old and Im tired every day.
Sad day.