We’ve had MMORPGs (massively multi-player online roleplaying games) for a while and now we’re increasingly just calling them MORPGs (Multi-player online roleplaying games).
During a conversation with friends we decided you needed Smallish-Multiplayer Online Roleplaying games (SMORG) to cover old games which have shrinking player bases, games which never really took off, and games which naturally thrive with small groups of players.
So, feel free to use this term.
I’ve played a lot more of Moria since I wrote my first mini-review and have seen a lot more content and thought I’d post a quick second review of the expansion. When I wrote the first article I’d completed most of Eregion and had seen Moria. Now I’ve spent a week exploring Moria, and have seen about three-quarters of the major locations and quested heavily in nearly half of them.
So how is it holding up?
The first thing I want to say is that the music in Moria is just superb. It easily makes the game a much richer experience and is both dramatic and appropriate. The music changes depending on which area of Moria you’re in and gives you a sense of the danger or safety of the location. The folk who scored this game deserve some recognition in an award.
Graphically Moria is as good as my first impressions made it feel, if not better. The architecture is epic and grand, and while each area has a distinct graphical look and feel, they also fit well together and a number of themes are present (for example, huge dwarf face carvings, or columns of immense proportions).
I’ve included a short video to give you an example, I was going to use screenshots but as I say in the video voice over, they didn’t capture the grand scale, because until you see the camera rotate, you don’t always realise how huge everything is.
Running around the place makes you feel like you’re taking part in an enormous adventure, the re-taking of Moria is in your blood, and you’ll do whatever it takes to defeat the evil and help the dwarves win.
Speaking of evil, there’s plenty of it around within the halls of Moria. Goblins and Orcs abound and they’ve been given a graphical facelift for their appearance in this expansion. The goblins look even more like those in the Moria segments of the movie, and the Orcs are subtly different from those in the rest of the game. The mines don’t have a huge range of other creatures within them, but there are worms, bats, beetles and other insects, frogs, salamanders, lizards, morroval, spiders (yes Oly, it has spiders) and wargs (so far). A lot of the critters don’t attack on sight, but there are enough enemies that do to make running anywhere a challenge. The intelligent creatures (orcs, goblins, morroval) are broken up into particular camps for the most part, while the other critters are spread throughout the mines in varying quantities.
The Moria area is broken up into 10 major locations, but they share the same chat channels (if you’ve played Lord of the Rings online you know that major locations such as Breelands or The Shire have their own chat channels for out of character, trade, advice, etc.) This is useful because it ensures you can talk to players anywhere within the Mines, but that each location gets a detailed map and a different feel. As well as the main locations there are instances and areas outside of the mines (other than just Eregion and Lothlorien). Movement between locations is achieved usually through a narrow entrance (either a corridor or bridge), although this isn’t always the case. Each main area has at least one horse master (although you use goats) and at least one main quest providing area (usually a dwarf camp).
So we get to the quests, the core of the Lord of the Rings Online and I have to say, Moria is just as pleasing in that regard as Eregion was. The quests are engaging, usually make some sense and encourage exploration of the surrounding areas. There is plenty of confusion caused by the use of multiple names for the same places (dwarven names and common names for example) which can sometimes lead you on a merry run around, but it all adds flavour. Each major hub has a bunch of quests in the immediate area and they expand the lore and tell the story of the Mines. As usual, there’s then one or two quests which send you off to the next major hub when you’ve finished the main lines in the current location. However there’s nothing to prevent you running ahead and picking quests from any location, and in fact it does sometimes help because quest tasks do overlap every now and then.
I do have some issues with some of the quest rewards (mainly weapons) but I’ll cover that in the Legendary Items section below. There is a new addition to the range of quest rewards – direct item experience which provides a nice boost to any legendary items you’re working on at the time. My Minstrel has quested (casually, so no Elite instances) throughout all the previous zones including Angmar and Goblin Town, and the armour and jewellery rewards from the Moria quests are useful upgrades in most cases.
The quests cover the usual range of activities, helping people escape from enemy infested areas, killing various numbers of enemy creatures, collecting random pieces of paper or lost artefacts and helping the dwarves generally gain control of the surrounding locations. There are some nice touches (and a feature of the LoTRo quest engine I love), for example you are required at one stage to recite a story in front of various dwarven statues to honour the builders of Moria. In general the quest experience is high quality and engaging.
I covered Legendary Items briefly in my previous post, having not had much chance to play with them. Now I’ve had much greater exposure and I find them both over- and underwhelming. The choice and sheer number of items is overwhelming. A two or three hour questing session can result in 5-15 Third Age Legendary Items for myself and Grete which we split. Maybe one or two of those are useful for our classes and the rest are for classes we don’t play. On top of that we gather further items which can be traded in for Third Age Legendary Items that are always useful for our class. So far, in about a week of play we’ve seen two Second Age Legendary Items (supposedly better than Third Age). On top of the sheer number, each item appears to have randomly generated benefits, so they’re sometimes hard to compare.
If you can’t use the items you can break them down into Relics, and up to three Relics can be placed into an item to further improve it. Additionally, the Relics can be merged together to make more powerful Relics (5 to 1). You can be earning XP on up to 6 Legendary Items at a time, even if they’re not currently equipped. Breaking down items one level after they’re reforged (every 10 levels) produces better rewards than if you had done them a level earlier (i.e. breaking them down at 11, 21, 31 is better than 10, 20, 30). The rewards can include Relics, items which give item XP when clicked and Legendary Shards.
Add all those things together and it’s very easy to get overwhelmed with choice. I had originally thought we would get a weapon and keep it for a long time, levelling it as we went. However it’s clear we’re going to be switching weapons quite a lot early on, until maybe getting just the right one for a little while. But basically, I find it all overwhelming.
And underwhelming? Yes, because so far the Legendary Items don’t seem that fantastic. Yes, they add bonuses you can’t get anywhere else, and some of those are cute, but I’m past caring about tiny improvements in stats on characters, I did that for seven years with EverQuest, now I just want to be able to survive the quests I do with Grete and friends and be able to complete the non-hardcore content. So in some ways, the range of features on Legendary Items doesn’t impress me.
A final word on this, the reward everyone gets for gaining access to Moria is a Legendary weapon. However, quest rewards further on inside Moria still give normal weapon rewards. Those weapons are pretty impressive in their own right. I’m confused about this choice, because I thought we were being encouraged to use Legendary Items as weapons, and yet a few quests in we’re being offered clubs and swords which far outstrip the DPS of the Legendary Weapons we’re wielding. This confuses me a great deal and I’m not sure what the intent of the developers was. Yes, some classes dual wield and so need two weapons, and someone suggested you could use a nice quest reward while levelling an inferior Legendary Weapon until it got better, but those seem like minor issues to me. Either Legendary Weapons are where it’s at, or they’re not and the mixed message from the developers tarnishes this otherwise interesting mechanic for me.
Lastly a very brief word on Lothlorien. I ran my dwarf all the way through Moria and out the other side (and very scary it was too). Lothlorien is initially blocked by another set of quests, in an area just outside the mines. As I understand it, the Lothlorien area is quite small, the development team focussed their efforts on Moria (and did very well) and the larger Lothlorien will be the result of the next free book of material.
I am so happy with the Mines of Moria. I think the development team did a superb job capturing the feeling and the scope. With the exception of one or two minor flaws this expansion has been the best MMORPG I’ve ever experienced.
Well, technically I spent the weekend in the surrounding parts of Eregion, but I certainly did step into Moria eventually. The first full expansion of the Lord of the Rings Online has been released – The Mines of Moria. I was pretty excited, I’ve always loved Tolkien’s dwarves and the body of lore they spawned in fantasy games like D&D, Warhammer, etc. I tend to end up playing dwarves in many of the fantasy games I play, and the character I spend most time on in Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) is a dwarf (guardian).
There’s something about the Mines of Moria that fills me with wonder and excitement both in Tolkien’s writing and in the movies. It’s no surprise therefore that I was looking forward to this expansion for the content alone.
Since the initial release there has been a massive amount of free content released for LOTRO including entire new areas, hundreds of new quests, thousands of new items, recipes, and lore. So you can bet any expansion you have to pay for is going to have to contain vast amounts of content to keep people happy. Moria’s content covers a cross-over area Eregion (in Eriador), which leads into Moria and finally into Lothlórien (both in Rhovanion). Eregion is a single ‘map’ location with four or five main quest areas. Moria is a bunch of different map locations, each of which looks pretty big and enjoyably complex, although I’ve so far only seen the first area. I’ve not been to Lothlórien so can’t comment on how large it is.
Each of these areas clearly have a huge number of quests and the Epic quest line has been updated to include the fellowship activity in the new locations. For casual players like myself at least, questing is the core of LOTRO, with most equipment, cash and experience coming from quest rewards, so whether an area is any good depends a lot on the quests, how they feel and how much they connect you to the Lord of the Rings lore.
As well as the new content, the expansion brings an increase to the level cap of 10 levels (maximum level is now 60), two new classes (Rune-Master and Warden), new skills, deeds and traits appropriate to the new levels and Legendary items. A new rank of tradeskill proficiency has been added (supreme) and new tradeskill resources and recipes required for that, additionally tradeskill guilds have been introduced which provide another source of recipes and require the gathering of guild reputation.
So, there’s a fair amount of stuff, and since both myself and Grete were still feeling pretty under the weather on Saturday, we decided to stay in and ‘play a little LOTRO’, which translated to spending most of Saturday and Sunday trying out the new content. Here, in no particular order, are my general thoughts.
The best ‘fix’ in the patch for Moria is that quest items no longer take up inventory space, they go into a special ‘slot’ against the quest. This is really good news, as I said earlier the core activity in LOTRO is questing, and that results in bags half full of half completed quest items. You can have around 40 active quests and if they all require you to gather some things it can soon get hard to manage. The new system frees up a lot of inventory space which is tightly managed in LOTRO and makes questing less painful.
I briefly played with a Rune-Master, levelling a character to 8. I’m always impressed with the classes in LOTRO, given there are two main archetypes (caster and melee) I’m always amazed that each melee or caster class has something unique to differentiate it from the others. No two melee play the same, and no two casters play the same. Rune-Masters use combat or healing skills, and the use of those skills builds combat or healing counters which either improve or prevent other skills in the fight. For example, in order to use some powerful combat ability you have to amass combat counters by using lesser combat abilities, but some healing abilities decrease combat counters and increase healing counters. Some healing abilities can’t be used if you have any combat counters and vice versa for some combat skills. The net result of this apparently complex but actually simple system is that during any single encounter the Rune-Master has to specialise in damage or healing and probably won’t be easily able to switch mid-fight. This unique slant made for some interesting choices even at low levels, and I can imagine the scope at higher levels is even greater.
I haven’t played with a Warden, but the combat mechanic appears to allow you to build special attacks by combining earlier attacks. Unlike previous classes which have defined routes to certain special abilities based on their skills, this appears to allow a more flexible approach to building a wider range of special abilities. Grete seemed to enjoy it at low levels.
This location is the introduction to the new expansion and is entered via the Trollshaws. With the exception of some fellowship quests in an instance full of elite creatures, I’ve pretty much done every obvious quest, and it was really enjoyable. The area is split into four main quest hubs, each progressing in difficulty and all having horse masters. A progressive deed allows you to obtain swift travel between the hubs, with initial travel being slow and having to be opened by visiting the horse master at least once (standard LOTRO approach).
The area is pretty open, with a number of ruins, some mountains and dry water-bed features and is mostly green (grassland, trees). In the south-eastern part of the area is a location which leads to another small map which contains the entrance to Moria and has the Black Pool. I like the open nature of LOTRO areas, they don’t usually restrict your movement by anything other than increasingly difficult creatures to get past, and Eregion is no different. The one exception is that it’s not possible to gain access to Moria until you complete the introductory quests in the Epic line (carried out in the little area mentioned above).
The general quests in Eregion cover the whole range of normal quest activity in LOTRO, and other than being made more difficult by the huge number of people present in the zone were fun to do.
The access quest line for Moria is fun and designed to be done solo (in fact, two stages have to be completed solo). They take place in a special version of the Black Pool area with a whole range of quest NPC’s and mini-quest dungeons. Once you get past a certain stage in this quest line you can no longer get into the special instance area, even if you’re in a fellowship with someone doing those quests. This is a bit of an issue (especially when we didn’t realise it would happen) because you can’t help your friends out. However, the access quest is soloable and not too difficult, it’s the other unrelated quests in that area that are tougher and have some decent rewards that might be more troublesome when 200 people aren’t doing it at once.
Once you fully complete the quest, you gain access to Moria through a more general Black Pool area which I’ve not fully explored yet to see if the instances still exist as well.
The access quest is very atmospheric and without giving away too many spoilers you get to see some tentacled and flaming creatures of legend.
The rest of Eregion is populated with the usual range of LOTRO creatures, wolves, wargs, beasts, humans of varying evilness and origin, a new lizard model, crows and trolls. My Minstrel progressed from level 48 to near 51 by completing most of the Eregion quests.
There are several key locations in Eregion that tie in with the Fellowship in the book, and they evoke enjoyable memories and make you feel close to the lore.
I’ve spent very little time in Moria so far, but wanted to give my initial impressions. Wow. Epic, huge, grand, amazing. The entrance hall is epic and the subsequent locations are brilliantly visualised. You get a real sense of the enormous scale of the place and the music is simply breathtaking. If the questing and adventuring lives up to the visuals it will be fantastic. We got totally lost three or four times trying to get from the entrance to the second secured location, and enjoyed every wrong turn.
Travel within the mines is achieved either on foot, or by goat ride between major locations once discovered.
The biggest equipment change in the new expansion is the introduction of Legendary items. Essentially, they are items which can be customised through the addition of relics, improved in power through the earning of experience and further customised by spending that experience on increasing special skill-based features on the items (like skill cost reduction, increase duration, increase damage, etc.) The reward for the Moria access quest is a Legendary item and the quest involves learning how to improve it which is a good introduction. Items gain experience through normal kills and through some quests, as well as via experience boosting dropped items. The experience does not detract from the regular character earned experience, but if you have more than one item currently levelling they do split item experienced earned.
I won’t cover these in too much detail, suffice to say that they bring a big amount of customisation that some people will love and others will gloss over mostly, and increase the complexity and scope of high level characters. I don’t know if lower level Legendary items will be added, although I suspect not from the lore given when you get your first one. You’ll either love them or just cope with them, but you won’t be able to avoid them.
I have mixed feelings about this, because an early bug meant that my Dwarf Guardian had some of his earned tradeskill points removed and I had to spend 3 hours making things to get them back. A new rank of tradeskill has been added (Supreme), which adds a new level of recipes and a whole new bunch of resources. The resources seemed plentiful in Eregion, although there appear to be two or three ranks of new resources (this is different to previous skill levels), with the higher rank resources showing up further inside Moria and beyond only. I do tradeskill more from an obligation to be at the highest rank, and because it gives some nice toys, rather than because I truly enjoy it, so I’m not the best person to review this addition.
I do like the introduction of tradeskill guilds, of which you can only be a member of one. Each guild provides new recipes (mostly more efficient versions of existing recipes, or slightly better versions of the results) which have long cooldown timers. They also introduction a range of guild token item recipes which are used either in the aforementioned new recipes or in gaining reputation with the guild, which is in turn required to buy further recipes. The interesting angle here for me is that it provides a reason to go back and collect low level resources to make guild tokens and gain reputation. Other people will consider it simply a straight time sink.
I’m biased. I’ve loved the Lord of the Rings since I read the books. I loved the movies. I love the lore, the concept, the very idea of being within Middle Earth taking on Goblins and Orcs. The Mines of Moria held special importance for me because I enjoy roleplaying dwarves, and the ideas of lost kingdoms, heroics and forgotten wealth inspire me. There was never any doubt I’d buy this expansion. With all that said, it had a lot to live up to, and so far it’s managed it quite handily. Eregion was fun and challenging and the Moria access quest was interesting. My first view of Moria was suitably awe inspiring, and subsequent exploration suggests there’s more to come. The bug with tradeskills pissed me off at first, and I’m just about over it. But it can’t quell the enjoyment I get from bashing orcs over the head and shouting Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-mênu! with the iconic images of Moria all around me and the sound of drums in the deep.
Worth watching, stick with it, they get better.
We went through character creation last night with C&C and OneOther ((yeh, I hate when people use acronyms, nick names and aliases to hide identity as well, but I also like making sure I respect people’s privacy)) so I’ve got a little bit more experience with the 4th edition PHB now. It feels a little chaotic and unordered, certainly during character creation you’re all over the place, reading stuff at the end of the book in the middle of character creation, etc. Maybe it’s because we’ve come from D&D -> AD&D -> AD&D 2nd Edition -> D&D 3rd Edition and we just find the format sort of jars.
One thing that I did finally nail down – I keep thinking ‘bah I can’t find the rule on xxxxyism this rulebook sucks’, and then it dawns on me there is no rule[tm]. For example, I was really struggling to find the rules on multiple attacks – until of course it dawned on me you don’t get any. Sure, if you have a power it may let you attack more than one thing at a time, but there’s no concept of native multiple basic attacks ((let me know if I’m wrong)). Likewise haste, took me a while to realise it wasn’t there. Two-weapon fighting, it looks like you just get a bonus to your damage, and you can swing whichever weapon you feel like, but never both in the same round. So there’s a bunch of what I would consider core elements from 2nd and 3rd edition which have been removed (in the name of simplicity) and it takes a while to get used to it.
It also only dawned on me half way through character creation that during combat, you’re going to be using your at-will powers virtually all the time. It’s going to be a rare moment that you decide (as a melee character) to make a basic attack. For example, fighters get to pick two from four at will attacks which are basically all at least equal to their base attack but usually superior in some way. There’s no reason you’d make a basic attack unless you’re forced to (opportunity attack for example). As a fighter, you’re going to be cleaving (hit your regular mob, do small amount of damage to an adjacent-to-you target) or reaping strike (do damage even if you miss) for example. I quite like this, but it’s clear where the source for this change comes from (more in a sec).
Without having fought any combat yet I can’t say how much I’m going to like the even more square-based positional tactical side of it. A lot of the powers for melee characters (and some for casters) really exploit positional situations (adjacent creatures, moving targets around, swapping positions), and if you don’t run combat in a way that enforces and benefits from that positional element a lot of powers become substantially weaker ((DM’s are going to have to work hard during fights with lots of creatures to ensure the bad guys take full benefit of positional tactics, it’s a much tougher situation for the DM, imo)). To me it feels like it takes away some of the freedom and imagination from combat; some people might say that it ensures everything is fair, but if the aim is to tell a collaborative story a good GM will ensure the combat is smooth, exciting, fair and still free. However, we’ll see how it plays out.
The computer-based RPG (and MMORPG / MMOG) influences in 4th edition are clear. Balanced classes, no absolute requirement for a cleric, the breakdown of classes into party roles (defender, leader, controller, striker, or tank, healer, crowd control and dps as most people know them), the idea of attacks based on powers rather than just swinging a weapon are all clearly derived from the recent popular MMOG’s. This isn’t a complaint, it’s clear that Wizards are hoping players who have discovered roleplaying on-line will move to paper-based if they can find some common ground. It’s just an observation.
The deep irony is that paper based RPG’s are really the grandfather of the modern online RPG. It’s interesting to see that cross-fertilisation and see things come full circle. Those of us who remember loading up The Bard’s Tale in 1987 on our Spectrums or C64’s will no doubt enjoy that.
I wrote a lengthy blog post about vertical or horizontal scaling in online roleplaying games, and Leigh wrote a just as lengthy comment. He made some interesting points which I thought I’d address in another post, rather than writing a lengthy comment in response to his lengthy comment.
I’m going to quote bits of his comment but you should really go and read the comment as well.
I’ve often wondered what a game can do for these types of people, who are, let’s face it, just after more experience, a higher level, or a bigger pot of gold than others in their peer group. While I do like the idea of more horizontal progression I think it ultimately leads to another dead end – it just takes players longer to get there.
Perhaps. And maybe horizontal expansion of that kind won’t interest a lot of players either, but what I think it provides is a flatter range of power which lets new players get involved quickly, without totally destroying the ability of people to progress into new things. If it’s done correctly.
How good would it be to have a chat system that shows all the channels available, makes it easy to set up your own and invite people, and gives a wealth of topics to talk about?
Without a doubt this is something I totally agree with. It’s certainly something I don’t think many games exploit as well as they could. There’s an increase in the tools to build web-based communities, but I know that a lot of players are only ‘in the game’ mindset, while they’re in the game, they don’t want to spend a lot of time outside of the game working on a forum or website. If there were easier ways to communicate on a global level within the games, it would help build community.
One of my big bugbears with WoW is that you can’t (or couldn’t when I played) talk to people if you weren’t in their alliance (i.e. horde vs alliance). You can’t even set them as a friend and see if they log on. Ok, so there’s some big PvP element in WoW and you don’t want alliance members tipping off the hoard about their every move – except if they wanted to they could just IM them. It’s stupid to prevent poeple talking to each other because of some in-game alliance mechanic.
Games should be doing as much as possible to facilitate communication, to allow persistent channels to exist, allow poeple to take part in those channels even if they’re not in the game perhaps. As you said, there should be an easy way to view all those channels and take part.
That covers another big hatred of mine, which I’ve mentioned previously, enforced geographical splits. Splitting up friends based on where they live to allow you to make support easier reduces community, it doesn’t build it.
Second Life doesn’t have a ‘game’, it doesn’t have a goal, it doesn’t have any progression mechanic, and yet it has huge communities built up around it, friendships, relationships. I’ve not really delved deeply into the chat side of Second Life but I know people who spend a lot of time socialising there. Which goes to show you don’t need a game to build a good community, but you do need good communities to build good multi-player games.
We’ve recently started using XFire to keep in-touch with friends spread through a lot of games. A persistent channel we can join and read from within just about any game, even if chatting isn’t always easy.
Here’s what we should be telling MMO producers.
How cool would it be if you could log in to your favourite chat channel (say #lunatics) and chat as EQ2.Realm.Nickname with WOW.Realm.Bob and LOTRO.World.Billy and SL.Vegas.Sarah. Each of those people could be in their own virtual game world, using the chat system and communicating with their own native tools in the chat channel and everyone could take part.
I know MMO producers want us to stay with their game for ever, but if they provided a cross-MMO communication device that was standard, people wouldn’t feel obliged to leave a game just because a bunch of their friends had, they could keep in touch.
We want cross-MMO communication tools built into our games and virtual worlds, and we want them soon.
I’d been thinking about the problem of ever-increasing levels in MMORPGs recently. In almost every respect it’s a symptom of the source for those games, paper based RPGs and to some extent paper based wargames. Certainly traditional roleplaying games for the most part were built on the concept of skill or level progression where-in you became more powerful and hence were able to take on greater and greater challenges. That power improvement came from increased skills in skill-based progression games (like the original Call of Cthulu), or in lumps in level-based progression games (D&D being the most famous). On top of that you gained access to better equipment and tools which in turn augmented your ability to survive and overcome. MMORPGs have for the most part inhereted that feature set.
However, for anyone who ever ran a long running level based progression (and to some extent skill based progression) roleplaying game, or ever played in a long running campaign, you should immediately spot the flaw. At some point you are more powerful than anything you can meet – unless the stakes are raised. In a solid campaign with a good backstory and a lot of information, it may not be a problem being at the same power level without any way of improving it. Perhaps the increased power comes instead from increased knowledge or increased resources or contacts. But the base point remains, once you can’t progress in power, you can’t take on more powerful challenges and the whole feeling of progression and improvement that people seem to love is lost.
So for many of us, the results are familiar, the original D&D game moved through Basic, Expert, Companion and Master levels. But they couldn’t resist bringing out the Immortals boxed set so you could become a god. People wanted to stay with their favourite characters, the ones they had built up over time, and who they knew, so the first option was to pop the top off the limit and raise it higher. The other option was to retire your characters and start over, with a new campaign or more often than not an entirely new rulebase for a change.
MMORPG’s are suffering the same issue. Everquest will soon be increasing the level cap to 85 or 90, WoW has increased it and will do so again, Lord of the Rings Online is moving to a level cap of 60 with the latest expansion (Moria). Once most of your players have their favourite characters at the maximum level, and they’ve had time to sample most of the content, what is there for them to do? Fine tune their characters, fill in the gaps with whatever ‘alternative advancement’ options they have, finish off the quests they never did, explore the parts of the world they never saw. But then what?
Any new content has to offer people at the maximum level something new – and if what they crave is to grow in power and scope, then naturally the first choice is to raise the level cap and increase the power of the enemy. Eventually it becomes surreal, in Everquest the Planes of Power pitted the players against the very gods themselves, but then in the next expansion it turns out the gods aren’t all powerful because there’s some other guy in a temple who’s even more powerful and then of course he turns out not to be that bad when an even more powerful enemy is found.
Raising the level cap lets people progress, but the cost is mudflation, and polarising the player base. If you have to provide new content for the people at the top level, new content for those at the lower levels suffers. There are only so many resources. Of course the other issue is that over time, the distance (in power terms) new players have to travel to team up with their high level friends is immense, and so coping mechanisms have been added where-by high level players are encouraged to group with their lower level friends (mentoring, for example).
Eventually people come to realise that killing level 122 dragons when you’re level 121 is about as challenging as killing level 22 dragons when you’re level 21. That the improvements in power are shallow and repetative. Some games deal with this by adding functionality (Everquests’ AA mechanism) but that brings balancing complexity, further alienates low level characters and soon becomes simply a means to an end (earning alternate ability points to make earning more alternate ability points easier).
You may be wondering why the hell people play these games if it’s all so negative. Firstly, while this issue may not come as a surprise to many long playing roleplayers it does seem to be an issue the ‘industry’ is only just coming to recognise as a serious issue. Secondly, there is an addictive quality to progressing your character either through gear, levels or skills. Just making that last final improvement or getting that much needed upgrade can be a good driver for playing. Thirdly, MMORPGs are engaging because they are socially rich. People like working with other people, or against them. People like forming clans or guilds or kinships, people enjoy sharing time with their friends and making new friends to share time with.
While MMORPGs are games they’re also social environments, something roleplayers sitting around a table have claimed for many years. Problem solving is fun and challenging, doing it with 7 other people only increases the challenge and potential for reward. So we have a situation in which people like playing games, they like ‘getting better’ over time, they like developing a single character who they associate with and they like sharing that space with other people. But at the moment, the standard response to the problem of continuing to provide a challenge to long term players is to increase the level cap, throw bigger enemies in and hope people don’t mind.
There are other options, and while reading around (reading around being searching once, reading two blogs) I found this and this. These posts discuss the ideas of horizontal game design rather than vertical (what I’ve been describing above is mostly vertical game design).
I liked Tipa’s idea of multiple locations, all in the same small level range, but in which your gear or experience or whatever it might be from other locations counts for naught, levelling the playing field. I like this idea, but it does feel like it might end up in a ‘collect the set’ situation for gear. Everquest did something sort of similar in the early days, where you really needed a good set of resist gear for certain encounters instead of your normal every day gear. What differentiated your ability to survive against your peers was how much of this gear you collected, not what level you were. So this is horizontal design by collecting new gear or new skills that only really benefit you in certain locations.
I think this solution would certainly fit some game designs better than others, imagine a game based around Stargate, where each new world discovered has a broad range of attributes which can be wildly different to other realms. Such wide differences lend themselves to limiting your success with your existing gear or skills. In a low-fantasy setting or modern world setting it may be harder to justify why your sword isn’t as effective in the newly discovered continent as it used to be in your home land. I guess you could build an entire world system on it, perhaps creatures on particular land masses are vulnerable to particular minerals only found on those same land masses, and virtually immune to everything else. But that feels like a stretch, I think the ‘new world’ approach would work a lot better.
I guess if I could reel off a few dozen ‘better’ horizontal design options I’d be a games designer and not a sysadmin.
It’s just struck me that faction / reputation is an attempt at horizontal design. Your political stance or reputation provides access to more quests, more locations and more challenging encounters but isn’t based on your level or skill-based power. Perhaps that element could be expanded to enable progression and increased challenge, although Everquest players certainly complain about the amount of necessary faction work involved (emphasis mine to prove the point). Maybe it can be more integral to the game, less explicit and more naturally obtained. A complex political system of factions and alliances may allow you access to quests or adventuring areas which are challenging and new but you can still bring your friends with you as long as you vouche for them, and if they do anything out of order you may find your own reputation suffering.
What I do know is that Second Life has no power progression, no game in that sense but still attracts a huge following. Sure, you can make money and it has sex, but that can’t be all of it? It has people, it has people interacting and working together to build places and do stuff. If you get a game that fits around that and provides fun and challenge then bingo.
Anyway as usual I’m rambling by this stage, set off with a good idea, murder it by the second paragraph and then waffle my way to a slippery conclusion. Here’s what I see as the basic truth, MMORPG creators are going to need to answer this issue and soon, or they’ll find everyone retires their characters or gets bored when they turn into gods. Tabletop roleplayers have known about it for years – time to catch on.
Anyone who has known me in the last few years knows I play EverQuest. I used to play EverQuest a lot, and in recent months that amount has decreased. It’s done that before, and then I get re-interested. There’s a long standing joke that you never quit EverQuest, everyone comes back. In EverQuest I’ve been a regular player, a guild member, a guild officer (a few times), a guild leader (for a short time), a raider, a casual raider, a grouper, a hard-core raider, a raid leader. I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online rolplaying game) ‘fun’, and what a game needs in order to make it as accessible as possible.
If you’ve followed the history of EverQuest or played you’ll know it had a pretty strong focus on ‘the group game’. In the early days it was tough to solo anything, impossible for some classes, challenging and slow for others. Grouping was really the only way to achieve any significant gain. This wasn’t an issue, there were many, many players also looking for groups. As the game has grown, and inevitably the player base has shrunk (and the number of low level characters shrunk and the number of places for people to go and hunt grown) that focus on the group game is causing some pain.
Competitors to EverQuest (World of Warcraft being the most famous) have taken a different slant. You can achieve significant gains without ever grouping, and even if you do need to group to complete a certain goal, you can be sure the time investment will be short, 10 minutes maybe, or 30 minutes, and you can achieve your goal and move on to other things together or alone.
In the current EverQuest many goals take hours and hours of time investment to achieve. This is both the reason it has been so successful and its biggest curse. For some people that challenge and time investment is what keeps them in the game, but for many it’s just not possible to invest four or five hours at the keyboard to achieve (and in some cases, not achieve) any significant gains. And yet there are people who claim WoW is ‘too easy’ and many who have played it and burned out quickly because there is less challenge and less content.
I’ve not played WoW to any significant level so I can’t comment on the specifics, but I have played a few MMORPG’s, and I do now, after 7 years or so, know what I want from a game. I’m not sure a single game can actually provide this, but this is what I think it would need.
This is necessary because people can’t and won’t commit huge amounts of time to a game, but if the game lets them achieve things in shorter time periods they will feel they are able to make progress even if they can only ‘pop in’.
Too many times I’ve been in a game with 2 or 3 friends, and we’re not able to achieve something or progress with just those friends because we don’t quite have the right classes, or someone has had to fall back to a less-favoured character to fill the space, or to 2-box a character to bring a required class along.
If 12 of my friends log in, we should be able to find something that challenges 12 of us, and the tools should support that. Obviously there needs to be a limit, but fixed group sizes are restrictive. The growing concept of ‘groups’ and ‘raids (collections of groups)’ is limiting. There should be a single concept to cover a ‘collection’ of players, and if that’s 2, 6, 11, 15, then so be it. Groups should flex to cope with the number of people present, the number of people present should not be massaged to ensure they fit into the game’s group structure.
Obviously, the game content should be interesting and engaging and impressive, but those are the things game developers would focus on anyway. The above 6 points are really the ones I have come to believe are critical for new non-niche MMORPGs.
I thought ‘I know, I’ll just stick WoW onto my machine and play for 14 days for free, for a bit of a break from EQ’. Hah! 120 minutes later I’m still patching.
Gah.
Back to work this morning after 14 days signed off. I wanted to come back – I can only imagine that suffering anxiety means the longer you stay off work the harder it is to get back to it, so I wanted to come back and deal with the issues directly. Usual back to work after a break stuff to do, cup of tea, catch up with people, read a thousand e-mails.
Grete’s taken up guitar lessons and singing lessons, which she’s really enjoying, and I know she’ll be good at. You can all come around and listen to us murdering Mull of Kintyre at some point. I’ll buy the cider with toe nail clippings for the full effect.
EverQuest is still fun – I’m going to say this even though most of you will have no clue what it means. My warrior character and the character’s of 5 friends succeeded in Tipt last night and we’re now KT flagged. It’s a huge achievement for us, and a weird feeling considering my wizard character has been flagged for ages (thanks to a raiding guild he was in) and has raided in those zones. But achieving it with friends is even more sweet.
Whether or not we’ll be able to repeat that Tipt run to get whole bunches of guild members flagged is another question. Takes about 2 hours to complete, needs a solid core of 3 or 4 players (tank, cleric, puller, cc) and 2 good dps classes to make it through, one of those classes needs to be a good backup healer, secondary rez is very useful, and good buffers essential because deaths are likely. That makes it hard to get 6 new people flagged every time.