Twelve starving men sat down at a table. Before them was placed a sumptuous banquet. Then one of the men protested: “I don’t like salt…”. So in order not to offend him the others agreed to remove the salt from the table. Then another man exclaimed: “I detest pepper…”. So in order not to anger him they all consented to remove the pepper from the table. Each remaining man rose in turn and protested yet another ingredient until there was nothing left on the table. With nothing left to eat the twelve men died of hunger.
Sound familiar? That story is a metaphor for the disintegration of MMORPGs in recent years. One by one, mechanics and features that have caused the slightest inconvenience to players has been removed or watered down as thoughtless subscribers unconcerned about the long-term health of their MMO cheer from the sidelines.
It was while reading Keen’s superb series of articles entitled Old MMO Mechanics that I Like and You Probably Hate (which was inspired by an article at We Fly Spitfires) where I fully realized how much this genre has been so utterly devastated by MMO companies eager to pander to new subscribers.
MMOs are dying a death of a thousand cuts as the unintended consequence of meddling game designers eager to “improve” their MMOs by dumbing-down their mechanics has eviscerated the end user experience that made MMOs so unique. The sense of challenge, danger and mystery has been replaced by a feeling of entitlement, security and predictability.
Putting a Smiley Face on Death
The most egregious change symptomatic of this new philosophy of convenience-driven gameplay has been the trivialization of the death penalty. Because of this, death has been rendered meaninglessness in most MMOs. Players lose any respect they had for dying and death itself. Failure has a token cost of a few coins.
Death and any semblance of unpleasantness or player accountability for that matter have become persona non grata in our sanitized theme park MMOs. When’s the last time you even saw a player corpse in a major MMO?
By death what we are really talking about is the concept of risk. This can be distilled even further: dying in a MMO is all about risking the investment of your time.
Or at least it used to be…
Why We Need to Bring Risk Back
Look at any serious endeavor, sport or game. The ability to risk is what separates the men from the boys. The potential to lose everything is what makes high stakes games worth playing. Real risk makes victory taste sweeter and defeat more frustrating. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Without any measure of true risk, rewards become inflationary, commonplace and pedestrian. When failure has little cost, players stop experiencing fear and its wise lessons. Learning to evaluate and mitigate risk also makes us better players as we will do all we can to avoid the consequences of losing.
Risk is the mother of every good and worthwhile aspect of MMORPGs. Challenge, community, camaraderie, player interdependence, socialization, immersion, respect for the world, respect for loot, respect for character progression — all are nourished from the wellspring of risk. Risk is what brings a virtual world to life and gives it immediacy and substance.
Years ago it was common to see debates about the relationship of risk versus reward on MMO discussion forums. Even the players back then rightly understood that you need sufficient amounts of risk to balance out rewards. Those players thrived on danger and even welcomed it. No longer. Rarely do we even speak of such matters as the prevailing game design philosophy seems to be KEEP THE PLAYERS HAPPY and WELL FED by:
- bestowing players with unearned praise and status
- granting easy character progression
- de-emphasizing player ability and skill
- distracting players by showering them with loot
Conclusion
As players eventually lose interest in MMOs and stop playing because of the constant watering down of the fundamentals the remaining players who are stupid enough to put up with it become the majority. If a restaurant that caters to vegetarians starts putting more and more meat on the menu it’s only a matter of time before the original patrons (vegetarians) will no longer patronize the restaurant. This is exactly what has happened to mass market MMOs as short-term design decisions has created and attracted a complacent, coddled and indolent player population.
In many ways the MMO player-base has become like the fickle mob in the Coliseum of ancient Rome; the MMO companies are much like the emperors: eager to appease the crowd with unhealthy distractions of bread and circuses. Anger the players at your own peril!
Of course we can blame MMO companies for these changes as per Richard Bartle’s astute observations that they need to recruit a constant influx of new players to keep their MMOs financially sound. But there is another reason for why MMOs have become so disappointing and vapid. I’m going to provide some answers and reveal the culprits in Part 2.
-Wolfshead
As you hint in the conclusion, strategy should focus on the needs of new players, because of the high degree of churn associated with MMOGs. So it is logical that a “successful” MMOG is one that evolves such that it is always attracting new players. Evolution is key, because the people attracted at product launch are the early adopters, the explorers, the weirdos. And 5 years later, you’re dealing with people that can’t even use a mouse. A mouse? Here’s Gregg Street, quoted in Eurogamer’s recent “How to make a Cataclysm”:
I know this from fishing. The easier I try and make the explanation, the more popular the explanation becomes, and yet still there are people who struggle. I have no problem with designing for the masses, because I recognize that I’m not accommodating myself. And it sounds like a cheap defense, but not designing for yourself is actually a lot harder. Ergo mainstream mass-market MMOGs are harder to develop than the niche hardcore gaming experiences that “we” know and love.
More fundamental our understanding of the issue, is that video games (and specifically MMOGs) have to move away from venture capital-style business models: Those billion dollar bets that mostly fail. Their products are now reasonably mature, and instead need a lot more focus on commercialisation. The aim is to make enough money from the mainstream audience to sustain the business long term, including the ability to fund risk internally. Love him or hate him, people like Bobby Kotick at least understand this part when they say they are serious about making more money from “the extras” than from the original sale of a game. They’ve realised that development costs can’t realistically be recouped from a $50 sale, especially when there is a high degree of uncertainty in the propensity to sell.
Critical, because once MMOGs break out of venture-style funding, they can start to adopt the innovative practices of other large businesses: Just because coke still tastes like coke, doesn’t mean Coca-Cola aren’t constantly innovating their products. In the meantime, “mainstream” MMOGs are still perceived as risky bets, and funders will do everything possible to limit risk on such a large product. So, for now, serious innovation comes from cheaper software platforms and indie developers. Ultimately, if the “proper games” industry doesn’t get its act together commercially, those indies will have the space to grow and challenge the bigger players themselves.
This isn’t a failure of innovation itself. This is a failure of a 3-guys-in-a-garage industry to establish the long-term commercial viability required for “big business” innovation.
Of course a MMO must make money to be viable but I fundamentally disagree with the approach being taken by the big companies now that are essentially copying the Blizzard formula.
I’m just concerned that the profit has become the prime directive of game design. We’ve seen how the concept of design by metrics has almost taken over game design in recent years. Game designers are followers — not leaders. They are like politicians. They are trying to buy the votes of their constituents with gimmickry and social programs much like game designers are trying to do with mechanics and features.
You can’t make a great MMO by pandering to focus groups and players. The current MMO model of production is on a sure pathway to oblivion. And I agree it’s going to be up to the guys in their garage — some future incarnation of Jobs and Wozniak — to completely change the paradigm.
This isn’t as simple as metrics are bad. It depends how you do it:
3 years ago, I recall Jessica Mulligan lamenting the lack of analytical work in MMOGs. In spite of (theoretically) having easy access to the type of data streams most regular businesses would kill for. Since then there seems to have been a rush towards “metrics” – but perhaps not analysis of those metrics? The difference is subtle but crucial. If you simply read raw data you tend to fail to appreciate paradoxes, the relative importance of contradictory sets of data, and so on. A good analytical designer isn’t one that acts on the first figure they read, just like a more good conventional designer isn’t one that automatically acts on the first player “suggestion” their receive.
Given the apparently sudden change in approach, it is entirely logical that there are now a lot of people with limited experience of using numbers. A lot of scope for analytics to be done badly.
Overall, consider the painter and the film maker:
The painter tends to individualistic. The (Hollywood) film-maker tends to be organising other people. Both can create great works of art. Both can be immitated poorly by the layman. Video game makers started as painters and are now film makers, because, like Hollywood, their medium became very complex. Indies continue to carve out niches – low-budget arthouse films, Flash games. But indies aren’t able to make WoW or SWTOR any more than they’re able to make Titanic or Avatar.
The danger for video games is that they become over-run by “Chick Flicks” – popular, profitable, but artistically limited creations. In film there are remarkably few people who can produce arthouse levels of creativity on a Hollywood scale, and perhaps in video games there are similarly few people?
It feels like the next feature or next MMO is designed by a commitee looking through statistics and totally mis-understanding the bigger picture. An MMO is like a roast dinner, its got a lot of different type of content in it that appeals to different people, often who engage in multiple activities, the RPG aspects of the world, solo gameplay, group gameplay, tradeskilling etc.
Lets say the group dungeons are the roast beef, maybe that is the majority of players favourite part of the game so logically to improve the game (roast dinner) we add in more beef and remove/trivialise the less enjoyed parts of the game. Because players have only so much time (so much they can eat) so we need to maximise their consumption of the enjoyable stuff as that’s the metric that improves the game.
Following that flawed thinking and all we have is a pile of beef, that’s tasty, but its not a roast dinner and its not something I want to come back to night after night. That’s what I felt STO offered, WoW with dungeon finder and even EQ2’s battlegrounds (despite being a fan of that game).
All three can be played in a very simplistic manner which while having lots of action just plain lacked the depth that a real MMO should have. There is no virtual world if you are just a BG PVPer in EQ2, nor is there any world teleporting to dungeons in WoW with the dungeon finder.
Without a meaningful realistic world and a wide variety of things to do that are interconnected I’m feeling these games are getting very simplistic, STO’s laughable spaceship combat gameplay was no different to one man bedroom programmer PD offerings on the Amiga.
If that was a real MMO for starters I wouldn’t be viewing the ship from some godlike (and very convenient) external view, secondly I’d expect to have some sort of interaction with the crew, I was very disapointed with the lack of depth and realism they put into such a key aspect of their universe.
I don’t think a well-run business would trade 1 million subscribers for 100,000, but that’s what you’re asking them to do by asking for more components of “risk” and penalty in games.
You make more friends in college by keeping your dorm room door open than by keeping it closed but unlocked and then hazing anyone who dares to open it. Hazing certainly gives more meaning to your friendship, but it’s hard to have friends in the first place when you start of by beating them with a paddle.
There are three approaches you can take as a pundit:
1. Try to convince the businessmen that they are doing the wrong thing. This will never work because they don’t care about doing the right thing, they care about making money.
2. Educate everyday players about why their decisions are destroying the game industry. Almost zero of the players that you want to reach will ever read anything you write, so this probably is wasted effort.
3. Preach to the choir. Through doing this you build up “convincing” arguments that establish your status as a critic/pundit among the circle of people who agree with your premises. This ultimately accomplishes nothing aside from making you look somewhat better to people who already agree with you. Your writing will be neigh undecipherable to anyone whose mind might be changed by the rhetoric due to the level of in-talk and presumed knowledge.
Raging against the status quo in MMOs is nice for a while. I think I’ve grown out of it. I understand why things are the way they are and I know enough that it will not be changed. Asking for mass market MMOs to follow paths that would take them away from the mass market will not lead to any change.
Your posts read more like polemics than analysis–this is what bothers me. I don’t think polemics by people like you or me have any point at this stage in the process.
I’m not deluding myself into thinking that I’m having any appreciable impact on the current MMO industry. I write my articles for my own edification and not to grow my readership or be popular.
I’m a bit concerned that the MMO blogophere has become comfortably numb in recent years and seems content to applaud Blizzard and their ilk. Financial success has somehow immunized these companies from any criticism. You can also forget the MMO press which is nothing more than a symbiotic relationship as they keep publishing their Disneyesque puff pieces.
I understand that I may seem bitter and despondent at a genre that has in my mind broken faith with the original players. Guilty as charged. It’s true nobody seems to write these kinds of articles anymore but I think there is still room for some kind of chronicle of the shortcomings of the MMO industry.
Notice I’m contrasting polemic with analysis. Analysis is beneficial and nice to read, especially when it comes with some suggestions to move forward in original ways. Polemics at this point have been done to death. We all know the basic arguments–now we need new ideas and interesting facts and synthesis.
Your article is not more than a polemic.
When I got fed up with MMORPGs a few months ago, I did the simplest thing: I stopped playing them and bothering with them. I wrote a few articles that briefly outlined my issues and moved on. I’d prefer to focus on the post-open world era of original MMOs instead of paying too much undue attention to the dinosaurs like World of Warcraft and its clones and predecessors.
I would prefer to move forward instead of dwelling on garbage. I wish you’d join me.
While I can’t argue with your risk vs. reward comments (because I agree with them), I’d still like to point out that very few people on this planet are actual risk takers. In fact, I believe most people are risk adverse.
They wake up. They go to work. They come home and feed the kids. They spend a few hours “unwinding.” They go to bed and start all over again.
The vast majority don’t invest in the stock market. They don’t run personal businesses. They don’t place their mortgage on red at the roulette wheel.
Why? They don’t like failure. They’ll take mediocrity over failure and inconvenience any day of the week.
Why do you think the vast majority (which game companies are pandering to in order to line their pocket books and pay their risk-taking investors) would seek risk in a video game?
The biggest penalty in MMOs these days is the inconvenience of wasted time. That’s about all most people can handle before giving up for something that satisfies their egos.
Point taken. However I believe that being part of a world that is fraught with danger, risk and consequences is much more satisfying and rewarding than a MMO where I feel no sense of danger or challenge.
I’d rather spend 30 gripping minutes experiencing real fear and danger than 2 hours of a safe and secure amusement park ride.
I’m going to talk about the real problem in my next article.
I thought that too, so I played EVE online where you lose your spaceship if you die. I spent 8 hours trying to find someone to fight and didn’t find a single person. Why? Because when risk is prominent, people are cautious, and action is extremely limited, hence there’s nothing to do. That seriously kills my buzz.
So undeterred, I did some research and finally found a target. I and another player got together and ambushed him. We had him down to 40% HP when four other spaceships promptly appeared and provided him with several times more healing than me and my friend could deal. Furthermore, we could not retaliate against any of these new ships due to broken game mechanics that do not consider healing an aggressive ship to be a hostile action, and thus firing on them would cause me to be instantly vaporized by the space-police since I was in a secured area. So the end-result was that this guy and his friends destroyed our ships which had taken many hours to assemble.
So I figure, “what’s the point”? I mean, risk is fine and all. D&D wouldn’t be anywhere near as fun if your character couldn’t die, but when you get into situations like these where risk is too high, it just becomes boring because skill is irrelevant. Either you bring way more people than the other guy and kill him instantly, or you don’t fight at all. The more risk you add, the more skill you take away because fewer and fewer people are going to be willing to leave those risks up to skill and chance.
This time I found the reaction to the article even more interesting than the article itself.
The basic premise set up by evizaer is that the penalty-free design full of reward for everyone regardless of effort or skill is more likely to attract a lot of subscribers. This is not exactly an ambitious quality approach, it is a manager and businesslike view of games. I would not call criticism of such degenerated design polemics.
There are gamers out there who still dream of a better MMO world. With such a design premise (~smart designers produce for a dumb crowd of gamers) it is no wonder that gamers get bored quickly and go back to their old favorite MMO.
Cryptic implemented a death penalty in STO (Star Trek Online) way after launch. OK, we can say the game got released before it was really launch-ready. But it shows how little value the designers put on risk vs reward. Now there is an optional very minor death penalty with a little higher reward for fighting at higher difficulty levels. It is actually just annoying and rather a waste of time, exactly what they wanted to prevent:
Craig Zinkievich:
Sidenote, I am still playing STO mostly for the space combat. It is still fun to me, even without a death penalty of any kind.
But this design idea seems to become a standard not only for Cryptic, but for the whole industry: You can “win” your daily quest to fight 3 times in this or that pvp map by LOSING. It is enough to be afk on the map.
In MMOs, there are only winners. Even if you lose. And this despite all attempts to make MMOs more like a “game”. The social and roleplaying side of MMOs get not nearly as much love or care as the mechanics. What charmed people with EQ, UO and WoW was for sure not the primitive game mechanics. They were just the vehicle for the MMO experience.
I got killed in online games. I managed to get back to my corpse and recover my stuff sometimes. Sometimes my horse was still alive. I ran from PKs and died or I made it and survived. This stirs up strong emotions.
I do not want to glorify a bloody pvp past, but right now we are experiencing the other extreme: win by losing.
On a related note, I find that people seem to be diverging into 2 groups right now in society as far as how they spend their leisure time.
First you have the video game culture in which people are stuck indoors entertaining themselves in an artificial, safe and risk free “game” environment.
Then you have another crowd of people that are into extreme sports, mountain climbing, mountain bikes, etc.
I’m just puzzled as to why the video game industry and in particular the MMO industry has taken the first trajectory and turned into WoWville.
Don’t people want to feel excitement, danger, the thrill of living on the edge at least virtually? That’s what I used to feel when I first played MMOs. Seeing my first Ancient Cyclops, camping for my Ghoulbane. Seeing Sand Giants for the first time. The awe and wonder are gone.
Snafzg already pointed it out, people are definitely risk adverse.
The funny thing is, extreme sports are really dangerous – but the virtual and completely safe games are full of risk free rewards. I personally would prefer to fight a dragon at high risk for character death in a virtual world…
But I cannot be that different from Joe Average, and I say something is fundamentally wrong when I log in and get rewarded and showered with achievements just for having logged in for x hours, getting a lollipop for getting pwned by one of the many super easy PvE mobs that can die to auto-attacks and all that.
People take instant gratification and rewards for sure if they are offered to them for free. They won’t pick the harder path. This makes the virtual world totally meaningless and interchangeable. People will never get invested very much in such a world. This might work for Farmville, but MMOs are and should not be Farmvilles. Different audience.
The golden middle is lost. Not many would play a world of permadeath, unrestricted pvp, strong mobs, little rewards and hardship of all kinds.
But I wonder why so many still fall for worlds that go to the other extreme: Ever easier mobs, grind, reward for daily attendance, everyone is a winner. Raids have also been made easier so that everyone can participate in the square dance, but they mark the pinnacle of the highest difficulty nowadays. PvP has been restricted to meaningless battlegrounds. Just be there to be rewarded and have some fun pushing buttons for shallow victories. Just spamming area attacks made my Warlock the ultimate winner in the all important damage meter! (Same in STO actually… lol)
SWTOR will offer everything that contemporary MMOs have. Just with millions of $ for more candy and a fully voiced personal story! I just see them repeating the degenerate design that has befallen MMOs at the core. Their great RPGs Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 already go in a less interactive and more story driven direction.
Damn, maybe they should just get over it and release a Star Wars movie combined from their many cinematic trailers with me as main actor.
I just hope I am wrong. Maybe Bioware with SWTOR or ArenaNet with GW2 take the genre into a new direction. Or Rift: Telara whatever. Or “Copernicus” by Schilling’s and Salvatore’s 38 Studios, though I have not heard anything about that for ages.
I just read Larisa, I agree that simply walking through the Shire is beautiful. But fawning about just that and delivering pie – that is not wrong, but it simply can’t be enough.
Evolution has mostly bred a love of “excitement, danger, the thrill of living on the edge” out of the gene pool. That sort of thing gets animals killed before they can breed.
I’m with the rest — this very much reads like yet another bitter, jaded blogger pining and whining for the “Good Ol’ Days” looking back through the rose-colored lenses of nostalgia. The funny part? In 10 years from now, the people who got started with WoW or anything else currently considered “dumbed down” will be writing these exact same posts pining for the Good Ol’ Days of WoW (and its many clones). I mean seriously, I was just waiting to be told to get off your lawn or how you used to walk your character barefoot uphill in the snow both ways…
Hardcore is such a minority it’s not even funny. Darkfall is hardcore and it has all of what, 10K players worldwide? I’d imagine Mortal Online will be in a similar situation. I still remember the whole Vanguard Vision bullshit and all the hardcore morons getting erections at the thought of death penalties and the mythical “meaningful travel.” Then they got into beta and *these same hardcore people* said “wtf? it’s taking an hour to get to my group! I’m wasting my whole night!” So they added fast travel and now the hardcore are right back to bitching about their “desire” for “meaningful travel.” That’s really all the hardcore do is bitch. They rarely have follow-through. MMO’s are not the Field of Dreams — if you build it, they won’t come; they’ll just bitch about it. I would just about guarantee that if a studio sat you down and said “hey Wolfshead, give us a list and we’ll make an MMO to your specifications” that once it arrived you wouldn’t even play it. The grass is always greener, my friend, and once you have what you thought you wanted, you discover you didn’t want it after all.
I’m all for having more of a sense of my character living in this virtual world and expanding what is available beyond just combat, combat, and more combat. Right now we’re in a very “these are just games”-centric development stance. Eventually the pendulum will start to swing the other way and my hope is that things will find a balance rather than continuing to swing from one extreme to the other every decade.
There can be plenty of risk but the bottom line is not all of us who used to have all day every day to play these games can do so anymore. We’ve grown up just like the developers have grown up. The new kids might actually be kids with the time we used to have but the companies still want us playing because we’re the ones making the money. I don’t want to have to run a corpse around to get my stuff. It’s just boring and yes, it is absolutely inconvenient. I don’t need to “win” every battle but I don’t feel a need to be further punished for “losing” one either. The problem, as Longasc noted, is that right now even the losers “win;” the “winners” simply win more. That may correct itself but in the meantime it’s good to be able to look at this extreme and see what really works and what is simply pandering then look back at what worked in your Good Ol’ Days and what was simply punishing and hope — HOPE — that the next stream of developers get to learn the lessons of both previous generations.
You make a lot of good points, but I wouldn’t say Darkfall online in anyway has anything to do with hardcore.
Its yet another simple player vs player game set in a MMO like gameworld, seeing the budget for it was dwarfed by AoC and WAR which both feature PVP as their endgames it seems to be that they’ve gotten the same results per money spent.
As for people looking back at WoW being much more hardcore, I can only see this if the future is farmville/facebook game shaped full of “free to play” virtual skinner boxes.
I don’t agree on risk though with Wolfshead, maybe its the way I’m wired up, but I don’t need to lose something to feel like I’m lost (permament death, XP loss, gear loss), I just need the option to fail at something to make me feel bad. Losing something just makes me feel bad and makes me re-run all the previous content again.
When games offer that alternative progression though that rewards something for failure that eventually gives success though that’s where I draw the line. If I can complete a game by failing say three times slower then by succeeding the game is fundementally designed wrong.
It’s a bit surprising that you of all, who have written a lot about the downside of skipping the world exploration part and just turning the game into an amusement park, pledging for more harsh penalties for death, more imminent danger, a tougher environment for new players.
I’ve recently had a little tourist look into LOTRO and enjoyed just running around in the Shire without any danger whatsoever, delivering pies and getting turned into a chicken (even though I never quite understood why that happened in the first place, but so what, it put a smile on my face!) There’s no danger to talk about, and yet I was enchanted at least for a few hours.
And I assure you that in WoW I definitely can get the thrill and the feel of putting something at stake, namely when I’m doing progression raids. It doesn’t matter that the repair bills are fairly easily paid – as a raider I HATE to lose and I take every try very seriously, having an emotional roller coster, with ups and downs depending on how it goes, getting very involved and invested in how we’re doing as a team. You don’t have to threaten me with permanent loss of gear, xp or whatever to make that happen. I’m excited as it is.
My perfect MMO can offer both: a peaceful silly playground where you’re just relaxing and a serious, super focusd, high performance requiring game that takes all of your focus and energy. It’s not one thing or another.
A game with very harsh penalties such as permanent death would be utterly unattractive to me and many other players who are starting very low down on the learning curve.
I kind of like it as it is tbh.
I believe that having more danger out in the wilderness makes exploration more meaningful. Where is the thrill when you can just fly around on your mount or run pas mobs on a fast horse with no sense of risk?
I completely agree with your assessment of LOTRO’s The Shire. It’s a masterpiece. I too was entranced and filled with a sense of awe and wonder. Sure there should always be safe havens in MMOs where players can get a break from risk. But to be honest with you I never felt the sense of fear and dread that was shrouding Tolkien’s Middle-earth as described so aptly in the books.
A town, city and castle feel that much more welcoming when there is true danger lurking just outside. We need more contrasts.
Pssh… Scott, you’re just not clever enough to make corpse recovery easy… and it was easy. 😛
Travel can be meaningful so long as their is content that caters to people that like to travel; explorers mainly. It’s difficult to do because most people just explore the local spoiler site. Devs just don’t bother, it’s easier to lead people around by the nose so they don’t have to make choices… they go where they’re told.
You do have some valid points, but so does Wolfhead – even if he is a bit bitter. Of course, you’re just as bitter about some of the older games and their mechanics.
A friend of mine says, “I could build the best MMO out there. It’d be so much fun! But no one else would play it.”
Don’t people want to feel excitement, danger, the thrill of living on the edge at least virtually? That’s what I used to feel when I first played MMOs. Seeing my first Ancient Cyclops, camping for my Ghoulbane. Seeing Sand Giants for the first time. The awe and wonder are gone.
As I said in my first comment, you are simply looking back through the rose-colored lenses of nostalgia.
“Seeing” your first Ancient Cyclops? “Seeing” your first Sand Giants? Of course the “awe and wonder” are gone. They were gone the second and third time you saw Ancient Cyclops and Sand Giants, as well. There’s no “risk” in “seeing” things; there *might* be “risk” associated with getting to where these things are, however, and that has not changed even in today’s MMO’s.
Like anything else when it comes to nostalgia, “you can never go home again,” or “nothing compares to the first love,” or any other number of quaint catch-phrases to sum up the fact that a substitute will never recapture those raw emotions we felt on the First Time.
Again, someone could make your Perfect MMO with all the risk, challenge, whatever else you think you want now and it would all pale because you’ve been there, done that. That’s just life man.
Well those are just personal memories of EQ that I treasure and not the best examples of risk. But, when you see a lumbering Sand Giant a few hundred paces from you, it’s like looking over a cliff — you are terrified. It’s like the feeling of driving down a 2 way highway, at some point you realize that you are at the mercy of the guy in the car driving toward you. One small mistake on his part and you are dead. Sadly, driving to the shopping mall is probably more exhilarating than playing a MMO these days.
Personally I don’t think the trading in risk for convenience is a good deal. The outside zones in most areas have become a joke with the real danger being inside the instanced dungeons. This is a concession to solo players and the casual, mom and pop demographic.
Indeed it is a concession. A profitable one.
A wise one.
Perhaps some risky overworld areas could be reintroduced, but you can’t make high risk a core design tenet and hope for mainstream success. That’s sociology more than anything.
I disagree that there needs to be a harsher death penalty, but maybe not precisely for the reasons above.
First, I think there is a significant death penalty (for raiding in particular) and that’s getting 10-25 people back to their corpses, fed, rebuffed, back into position, and ready to go without going AFK or ragequitting. In some sense idiots are your death penalty, but that can be somewhat alleviated if you can improve your guild/group composotion. You optimally spend this time analyzing what went wrong, but let’s be fair, it’s downtime, and on progression content it’s up to 1/2 your time spent playing. That’s 50% of your total play time consumed by death penalty. And that’s not counting time for farming gold to pay for buffs/repairs.
Second, there’s a trade off between how harsh the death penalty is and how hard you can make content, and it comes back to that %downtime metric I just mentioned. You can make harder content with an easy death penalty and the tradeoff is that you’re going to die all the time. Imagine if it takes my raid 20 tried to down a boss, and I lose 10% of my XP for every death. Suddenly my guild has lost a level and can’t even get into the instance anymore, and instead have to spend a raid night running back through leveling content to get back to the fun part of learning a proper strategy for our raid composition to down this incredibly hard boss. And the heroic end game boss in WoW right now takes something like 100+ attempts even with a 20% buff.
In WoW, fights are short, 3-8 minutes, so you can easily die 20 times in a single night of progression raiding. Imagine if the first half of the raid night was spent raiding, and the second half want spend recovering from raiding. That’s pretty amusing to me in concept, but probably less fun in practice. Now, if fights were more epic, and perhaps more strategic rather than tactical, and a single encounter lasted 20 minutes, that might be different. You could die 4 times a night and go pay the deferred death penalty during downtime. But, for better or worse, that’s not what we have in any MMO that I’ve heard of (though hopefully someone does that currently).
Now, this is end game content. Maybe there should be different rules for the leveling and adventuring half of content. I could kind of get behind that, especially for your first couple toons. I support all kinds of difficulty for first-toons, so long as they can be alleviated for later ones. For instance, walking around Northrend the first time through, then buying the Tome so you can fly around next time. And heirlooms. But that’s a whole separate discussion in my mind.
🙂 Go play WoW on Nightmare or Hell levels and come back and tell us its fun, that it didn’t alter your game experience.
“The sense of challenge, danger and mystery has been replaced by a feeling of entitlement, security and predictability.”
I just have to chime in and suggest that the subscription model feeds this attitude directly. When you’re paying each month for your game, you want more than frustration out of it and time sinks that make it *more* costly. You want fun for your money. When death isn’t fun, it’s not worth paying for. Entitlement comes from investment. (Which works with time, too; if the time sinks of death penalties are onerous, entitlement to a fun experience kicks in again to object.)
So… make death fun somehow? I’m talking about death itself, not trying to balance it out with bigger pieces of cheese and greater reward for the risk of lost time.
…on another tack, I certainly don’t mind challenge in my games. I simply want to be able to choose when I’m challenged and when I’m not, because my tastes change over time. I want to be able to choose high risk/reward or low risk/reward, not have the choice made for me.
I’d like to three-man a dungeon designed for 5, perhaps, and receive concurrent rewards for the increased risk. Maybe later I want to take 11 into the same dungeon and steamroll it to just show some noobs around. I don’t mind getting lesser rewards then. We don’t have that granularity at present… but the answer isn’t to make the whole game riskier, no more than the answer is to make the whole game safer.
Challenge – yes! I agree on that too. I’d really like to see for instance the option of choosing to 3-man LFD instances in WoW for increased difficulty level. But: this will give a thrill big enough. You don’t have to add more severe death penalty to make it more interesting.
Indeed. I have a curious habit of soloing multiplayer dungeons in Wizard 101, and it’s a rush. I’m almost always dancing on the edge of failure, and sometimes I blow it, but when I succeed, it’s awesome.
…and it has *absolutely nothing* to do with a death penalty. The DP in W101 is pretty light, and if it were harsher, it would just be onerous. The rush of beating long odds is *in the doing*, not in avoiding an annoying death penalty. That may be a subtle difference, but to me, it’s really what the mentality of challenging myself hinges on. I’m there to succeed, not to avoid failing.
Oh, and Larisa, your recent post mentioning a dungeon run where you did tackle it as a duo definitely echoed with me. I’ve had similar thoughts recently, and have another article in the pipe on it. I think that challenge is still out there to be found, you just have to play outside the lines. Maybe that’s best, but I do think it would be nice sometimes to have some sort of concurrent rewards for biting off more than I’m supposed to chew, and succeeding.
Maybe the play’s the thing after all, though. The game is what you make of it. I’ve been able to find ways to challenge myself. Do I really need The Man to pat me on the head and give me an Achievement and shiny loot for doing things the way I want to?
To clarify a bit, a death penalty kicks me when I’m down after already failing. It’s insult to injury. If I fail, that’s loss enough in itself when I’m trying to accomplish something; the binary state of “succeed/fail” has been settled. I don’t need to have a penalty that makes trying again even harder or is just a time sink, like XP loss. That is just a waste of time.
I wholeheartedly agree with you Tesh. When I first started playing STO I hated dying getting blown up, still do. It has nothing to do a with a death penalty and everything to do with “dang it, I could have done better.”
I also like the idea of challenge versus grind. I think the biggest reason for gear-oriented rewards, particularly in WoW, is because that is how you show progression in the end-game. It’s a vicious cycle, the developers have turned the high level players into gods on Azeroth and the only way they have come up with to challenge us is to increase the gear requirement of the the end-game content, as opposed to making the strategy harder. Just about every encounter in ICC is a basic tank-and-spank with ever sturdier and harder-hitting bosses. (Yes, I know there are slight variations.) I got tired of it. Why? Because grinding the same four or five or six bosses every few nights for weeks or months is like watching the same episode of “I Love Lucy” repeatedly over the same amount of time. I like to explore new places, not go back to the same thing over and over.
Overall, I like this lively discussion. Great thoughts, everyone.
Oh how I agree on this! There certainly are challenges there. Make red quests rather than green = challenge is back!
Two-man instances instead of five-man them. Downgrade your gear. Solo the elite world mobs.
There are loads of options! Still very few people do this. Instead they keep going on whining and whining about the lack of difficulty. And the key to this is probably the pat on shoulder, the praise from other players, the bragging rights.
It bugs me a little though. Why is it that we have to have the gear or achievement award to feel that taking a challenge is worthwhile? Aren’t we grown-ups after all? Shouldn’t just the pure knowledge that “I tried something hard and I succeeded, hence I rock” be reward enough?
I can’t make anything to change other players mindset in this, but I’ll at least try to change my own.
I think I want extra rewards for high risk just because they are a key to opening up more places to go and things to see. If I were puttering around at the level cap with no place in the world cut off from my prying inquisitiveness, I really wouldn’t care about the rewards. Indeed, success would be enough.
During the leveling curve, though, I like the notion that succeeding at challenging tasks means I progress faster because I’m performing better, so I don’t have to go grind on lesser challenges just to satisfy the time sink. If I can handle elites, let me move on. I have a similar attitude toward schoolwork; I’ve always hated busywork.
It really is satisfying to overcome something that once looked impossible. Even so, once conquered, there is a definite sense of diminishing returns if I have to repeat the task over and over, to the point where it’s rote and mechanical, especially if it’s just so I can qualify to go do something else.
Great post I agree with a lot of it. Unfortunately, it feels like game designers approach to MMO’s have been.
WoW has 10 million subs
copy WoW
We’ll have 10 million subs
Even-though this type of strategy has been proven to fail time after time, designers just can’t let go of it for some reason. I understand there’s a fine line between risk and tedious time sink, but developers shouldn’t be afraid to get close to the line as they are now.
Funny, alot of people play Poker and lose / win real money. They don’t start yelling “I am entitled to be a winner!” if they see their assets going out the window. Personally I’m not interested in playing another re-skinned WoW-Clone within only slightly adjusted boundaries of boredom.
Usually I mostly agree with your posts, but this one I agree with wholeheartedly. The point of a game is risk-taking without the actual risk; but if even the concept of risk of your time is taken away it defeats the whole purpose. I don’t think of ” a point of view” as whining, but instead you’re giving a well-reasoned argument. There’s plenty of blogs out there I can read that will swoon about “sparkle-ponies” and other insidious mind-candy; if game companies aren’t reminded (via this and other means… i.e. falling sales) that a hard-core or at least a fairly authoritative end IS BEST. I paid for that death… it best be a bloody and fairly impressive one.
Ultimately you are right, Jay. Only voting with your pocketbook (credit card?) will help them understand what you want. Until then they have millions of argument$ to keep things the way they are.
Nice article. I’m disappointed that I don’t see more of this opinion out there.
I think that there’s a nice marketable niche out there for a game that caters more to the PvE, raiding, looking for a challenge crowd. Notice that I didn’t say hardcore, because it doesn’t have to be built to cater to the 7-day a week, 10 hour a day player. I play 3 or 4 days a week 3 or 4 hours at a time and I’d like to be challenged more.
I don’t think that I’d ever want to go back to the grind that was EQ, but the pendulum has definitely swung to far the other way. It doesn’t seem like it would be all that difficult to find a middle ground that incorporates some of the best features from many of the successful games.
Vyll
Everything about WoW says easy mode. You know, minesweeper with a few more formulas. And yet, that’s all the time and effort I can afford these days.
For what it’s worth my real life is hyper-risk averse and I overcompensate gratuitously by torturing myself in games. I don’t believe I’m a market of one. Clearly there is at least two as I agree entirely with Wolfhead.
Still the thing that disappoints me is not so much that I can return to LotRO after six months to find it nerfed to the ground.
Or even that I’ve spent the last two weeks dragging a somewhat charming but whiny child around who complained every time he ninja-pulled 4 mobs and got us both killed because he’s ‘not getting XP because he keeps dying’; hanging around me like a limpet because ‘Loremasters can’t solo’ (even though they’re arguably over-equipped for it); though I still like him in his own cute (and my own patronising) way and prefer to group with anyone than not at all.
It’s that these discussions are so binary. An unspoken acceptance that every MMO must be one or another. Either I win and you RAGE or you win and I RAGE.
In worlds of these scope there should be room enough for all of us.
Maybe if we all fought for each other, we could get the MMOs we deserved and all make friends.
Nah I didn’t think so, you can carry on with your fight now.
What people don’t understand is that risk can sometimes be a good thing. It brings incentives, amplifies the overall quality of rewards, and breathes life into an MMO that is almost on par with working in a office cubicle for hours on end. Sure, people live convenient lives and they may mirror this in their MMO, but don’t we play games to escape from the real world? Take on challenges and put ourselves in risky situations that we otherwise wouldn’t do?
I also think risk could indirectly improve socialization a bit as well. WoW is far too soloable as reiterated countless times, so if you add in a little risk, make quests or mobs more challenging to complete by yourself, this could encourage people to group up more and make friends. People could learn to bond together in friendships and camaraderie to complete difficult tasks and then reap the rewards for their combined efforts.
I think you don’t need risk, but you do need difficulty. Risk is a penalty after the fact: difficulty is a challenge. When I played FFXI (probably the most risky of recent PvE games in that you can lose exp and delevel easily.) risk added little. But the difficulty of content added a lot.
I think if you spike difficulty and also make MMOs deeper than hotbar rotations and standing in one spot, risk isn’t needed as much.
That is an interesting thought. Risk should rather be tied to reward. Higher risk to yourself (whatever this might be) equals potentially higher reward.
But too often the difficulty of MMOs gets reduced to next to nothing. This has mostly befallen the “world” mobs. At the same time there is little risk to die and little penalty involved with death.
Probably out of the fear that even a mollycoddled death will make the subscriber immediately unsubscribe in frustration?
Wolfshead is right that risk is a relevant and important part of the MMO experience. It made venturing about in the world a lot more interesting, especially travel. Mainly, players were willing to play the game in a different way, running from mobs, squeezing past camps of mobs, invising carefully about.
Risk did have a major negative aspect, namely that unskilled players could get smacked down bad pretty early or that one would have a bad run later on, have lag deaths, or other frustration. A game penalty, turned over-kill, ruins the game experience and gives people good reasons to quit.
For a veteran player, the death risk made the game a whole lot deeper. You rarely died, but you played to avoid dying. For a newer player, it could lock you into level ranges forever as you kept dying before you could get out. The former reaction benefited the genre, the latter probably killed lots of EQ subscriptions.
But EQ was a very good retainer of subscriptions, I remember in Kunark, Verant was interviewed as saying the average subscriber plays 12 months. I can’t imagine how long the average WoW subscriber stayed, can’t be more than a few months.
For the average WoW subscription length to be only a few months, wouldn’t that mean that you’d need to have had more than 100 million people take up the game? I don’t think that’s the case. I think you’ll find that WoW is also a very good retainer of subscriptions.
The problem is the amount of risk people are willing to take when playing a game. Experienced players will tend to go for more risks in order to better enjoy the game, new comers will look for little punishment for their fun. It’s just like in poker.
I think the point in your article works for what we could call the big players, not the mainstream ones. The latter being the vast majority of course. As gaming permeates the society more and more, I think mainstream gamers could get educated to becoming bigger players with time, but we’re talking on a generational scale, at least.
Right now, I could see the game you’d love to play made by some kind of big indie studio (if that even exists) with a target at 300 or 400K registered players. That could make a lot of “big players” out there and a studio very very happy.
I recognize that I am coming way late to the party but I had one thing I wanted to add. In reading through all of the comments the general notion that a lot of us are putting forth is that all people are sheep. The logic is basically, “players demanded this, this is obviously what they want and they’re sheep.”
If you’ve ever had the opportunity to be a parent or a manager you’ll learn something. People largely do not know what they actually want. They do sometimes and sometimes they don’t.
Our games have followed down this trend of just giving people “What they want” everyone ASSUMES that this is right. Everyone makes the argument “11 million people can’t be wrong.” They actually can be!
Everyone is so down on risk vs reward nobody tries it. Nobody can say with any degree of certainty that if someone took pre-Planes of Power EQ1, put modern graphics on it and released it that it wouldn’t be a hit. Notice I said hit. I didn’t say WoW killer. Does everyone truly believe there aren’t 500,000 American MMO players who wouldn’t enjoy that type of game?
I think a “hardcore” game would do just fine. Everyone just seems willing to write it off though and say that nobody would play it. I suppose we’re just as willing to avoid risk as everyone we complain about!
You’ve touched on a truth that is seldom acknowledged it’s this: that people don’t know what they want until they see it. Most aren’t leaders, rather they are followers.
As a manager, parent, video game designer or anyone in authority you should never give in to the opinions of the masses just because they *think* they want something. You can’t run an organization like that at all. Most organizations are not democracies. If they were most of them would crumble.
The majority of players — not all — are inherently selfish and will lobby for things that benefit them to the detriment of the long-term health of the MMO and community.
Another human tendency is to take the path of least resistance. People love shortcuts. They want inconvenient mechanics turned into convenient mechanics. Suddenly anything that takes any time at all is regarded as tedium. Companies like Blizzard try to cater to these gamers by eliminating and reducing anything that is not pure “fun”.
It’s analogous to having sex without the foreplay, romance and commitment. Gaming has been reduced to instant gratification without regard for earning it. This in fact is the grand illusion and appeal of addictive drugs.
The fact that everyone pays a subscription also creates a sense of entitlement as well. Tesh has made some great points about this.
Game designers who work on MMOs and virtual worlds are in fact caretakers. They need to have be wise and responsible in their administration of their worlds. What they are doing now is tearing down the long standing foundations of how virtual worlds have always worked all in the name of increasing their profits by expanding their demographics.
Game design today is all about the science of metrics and money. I shudder to think what would happen if companies like Blizzard or Zynga were to redesign venerable games like Chess or Backgammon.
At some point players are going to start realizing how little risk and danger there is in most modern MMOs. For me, experiencing those feelings in an persistent online multi-player video game were what drew me to this genre in the first place.
We’ve fallen victim to a clever bait and switch scheme.
Here’s a thought:
In MMOs no one really dies anyway. I mean, you lose all your health, but you’re rezzed or (in a game like CoH) defeated or arrested. To die in a game, to me, would insinuate perma-death and I’ve already explained my ideas for that many other places.
But, what if, instead of offering xp / money / res sickness for death penalties, we look at expanding the breadth of what an MMO offers in the way of social offerings. I don’t mean social stuff like Facebook nonsense, but more so … introduce more factions (but not necessarily faction grinding) and political parts of the game so when you fail in something, it has a repercussion.
Let’s say you take a quest and go try to complete it. You fail because the big boss at the end wipes the floor with you. You can either attempt a tactical retreat, in which if you succeed you get out, but you’ve now failed the mission and your employer might look down on you with disdain OR you do utterly fail even in your escape attempt and you’re captured, much akin to spending time in jail in the old Daggerfall or other Elder Scrolls games.
Now, you don’t just sit there in prison. You’re put into fighting pits or some such thing, kind of a little side adventure, in which if you’re smart enough, you can use the environment and situation to hatch a crafty escape. Or maybe, if you have high standings in the town you came from, a search party is dispatched that you get to control (one for each member in your party, minimum of 2, one you, one CPU controlled if you soloed) to go into the den of evil you tried to traverse and pull you out.
These types of alternatives to death don’t necessarily reward you for dying, and in fact penalize you in an important aspect of the game if you’re looking to gain ranks in a particular city’s favor, but also offer a bit of side action apart from your original intent.
Yes, yes … people will complain about control being taken from their character and such, but people bitch about everything 😛
I’ve argued before that death should be fun. If the “death penalty” is just a time sink (corpse run) or gold sink (itself a time sink, really), it’s just a speed bump, or a kick in the head for already failing. Insult to injury.
If, however, death had repercussions like a stay in prison, that could be a lot of fun. You might even die on purpose, if you’re weird enough or a big enough fan of Planescape Torment. It might even be a different progression track, instead of just something you Alt-Tab away from or leave the game altogether.
Even so, if you have to do that every time you die, it can pretty quickly turn into another big time sink.
I think we’re really running into a core philosophy of MMO design here; the constant need to progress rather than play. If a death penalty stalls progress, it’s annoying. If it’s a punishment for failure, actively eating away at progress, it’s a kick in the teeth.
…but it doesn’t have to stop you from *playing*. If you can still *play* the game in some way, even after death, even if you’re not progressing, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad?
…of course, you’d want to deemphasize progression somehow, to try to keep the core motivation for participation *play*, not progress. That’s a big change, but one I think might be worth addressing before risk/reward can be altered much. If death penalties erase hours or days of play, of course they aren’t going to be fun, no matter the reward for success.
(Note that the rewards might still be pretty cool, but it’s a mistaken assumption that better rewards are going to make failure itself fun.)
Well you and I had a discussion once upon a time I think, Tesh, in which we described a game that actually made use of the death mechanic by making it a progressional stage to the next part of the game.
Basically you play the game for awhile, doing your best NOT to die before you’ve accumulated wealth or fame or whatever your heart desires, and when you finally do die, you’re presented with the next stage of the game entirely. Whether that be helping the living people below, or forging a new adventure as some sort of reborn hero or even helping in the realm of the dead as a reshaped and reformed hero based on your deeds accomplished before you died in the corporeal world.
Of course you have to deal with the regular deaths in the game before you get to the final death, but in those instances you can just have the person come before a judge or jury and be “measured” and sent back based on lack of reason to be in the afterlife … almost like as if it were a privilege.
Not sure death always has to be looked at as a bad thing 😉
Yup, “death” can certainly be an interesting thing if done right, and I wish devs would get a bit more creative with it.
I detest time sinks the same way I detest busywork in college courses and any other punishing mindless task. Death and risk need not go that route.
I just wanted to say Great Article. Very thought provoking, no matter what some of the critics have posted.
The reality for me is exactly what has been stated above, MMO’s tend to go bad when the creators/dev’s listen to the masses. Some of my fondest memories go back to Asherons’ Call. A game that would most likely “fail” into today’s market, yet it contained a lot of great features. Spellcrafting, spell components, currency weight, unfortunately corpse runs, and of course death penalties…although I don’t think it would delevel you.
It was my first MMO, and like my first girlfriend, I have fond memories of it…often forgetting all the angry moments as time passes.
I agree that in today’s world of gaming, death penalties are somewhat of a joke. Just today I was leveling in Age of Conan and fighting a group of cannibals and such when I got overran. Fortunately there was a rez stone very very close to the fight area, so I simply released ran back and essentially continued the fight with my buddies. This is just one example of the lack of risk involved…when you can simply just run back to continue the fight with only a minor delay (the release, run back, rebuff, etc). Overall, not very challenging.
I hated corpse runs, but it did make me very aware of a few things. 1. health 2. roaming mobs 3. other players/gankers 4. respawns
And while I am still often aware of those things, I, like most players, are not “worried” about it. It’s not like I’m going to drop my new sword and lose it…
On the other hand, we need to understand that many of the new gamers that are coming up are being raised in the “We don’t keep score & everyone get’s a trophy” age. So often challenges are not what these younger players really want…they simply want the rewards and are will to pay for them (aka Blizzard approach).
Well I could go on, but it’s late and I fear I may be rambling. Great post and am looking forward to more.
Oh and btw, I believe it was Jay Abraham who said; “People are silently begging to be led.”
😉