Thursday, February 24, 2011
The Time Capsule
Something I was linked by a friend. A thread about WoW in 2004, when it was still in beta. It's a very interesting read. http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=13301
Sunday, February 13, 2011
The Smoking Crater
Oh geez, World of Warcraft. Such a huge topic, lots of shades of love and hate from people about this game. Everywhere you look, everyone's got OPINIONS OPINIONS OPINIONS OPINIONS, and for good reason. WoW has a lot of polarizing features. I'm not really one to give my personal opinion on the subject, though, I'd much rather simply state the facts and state both sides if there is any dispute. I will touch on the love/hate with WoW... eventually. First, however, I'd like to talk about what WoW was, is, and what it has done to the genre.
King Slayer
It was a simple enough idea, really. Blizzard of Starcraft, Diablo, and Warcraft fame wanted to take the MMO genre and put its own spin on it. At the time, Everquest was still the reigning king of level grinding, to dethrone such a game would be quite a feat. How did Blizzard do it? I'll tell you one thing, it wasn't WoW's content. EQ far outclassed WoW in every way when it came to content, even a full year into WoW's life. WoW became the most popular MMO for the same reason many WoW vets hate the game now. Three words: Ease of Access. That's right, WoW dethroned EQ by being easier. Is that to say that WoW was not hardcore? Of course not. WoW's raiding and PvP communities are certainly hardcore, but the leveling and questing were simple and pain-free by EQ's standards. To properly explain the stark difference between these two games, though, I have to tell you about EQ.
EQ was made while UO was still in its heyday, which meant that the big thing to copy when you're making an MMO is to make a detailed world that feels real. Making the player feel like they are actually a part of this world was the number one design philosophy in those days. To this end, EQ's questing was, well, not assisted. What does this mean exactly? No hints from the game itself, no golden punctuation marks, no giant circles on your map. The majority of quests only helped you in their quest text, which was usually cryptic at best. Now, this actually worked in EQ, since you didn't quest to level up. Leveling in EQ was a straight grind, and quests were something you did for a reward that wasn't XP, which was extremely common in MMOs pre-WoW, games like Ragnarok Online and Final Fantasy XI.
Now, to compare EQ leveling with WoW leveling. In EQ you would only kill mobs for hours on end to gain XP and level up. The style in which you killed mobs varied of course, depending on how many people you had. Common tactics included soloing, group AoE farming, and kite killing. Barring leeching and power-leveling, which require you to know people of high levels who are willing to invest time into your character, killing mobs was the only effective way to level your character until you hit end game, which usually didn't even start at level-cap (since damage level-scaling didn't really exist until WoW. Generally speaking a level 80 of class X wasn't that much different from a level 85; it was an advantage, sure, but nothing game-changing). See, other MMOs often used soft-caps to keep their players interested. A soft-cap, for those of you who don't know, is a point during a progression where the time required to progress further increases exponentially. If a game had skill X at a soft cap of 50, but a hard cap of 100, the time to get from 1 to 50 is a rather steady progression, but the time to hit 51 may take double the time, and 52 double the time of that, until it gets to the point where only 3 players ever may have hit 100.
In WoW, hitting cap was actually very fast compared to any themepark MMO that had come before it. Questing was your primary source of XP and leveling gear. Quests took you from one questing location to the next, which was rather slick for its time. In fact, because hitting cap was so relatively easy, it meant that lots of players who couldn't experience endgame content in other MMOs could in WoW. Of course that only really applies to the MMO veterans that switched to WoW. Due to WoW's ease of access, it gained a massive popularity with the casual market. The casual market, of course, had no interest in investing the time in the game to obtain raid-quality loot. The unwillingness was understandable, as many people simply don't have the time, dedication, or willingness to invest so much time raiding. There was a problem with the system as it was, though. In MMO's, you are rewarded much more by time invested in the game than personal skill. This is no less true for WoW. Casual players who wished to participate in PvP stood no chance against those who simply had more time to invest in the game. While this made sense from a mechanical perspective and from the MMO vets who were used to this format, the new players were not happy that they could not have fun in these aspects of the game because they choose not to play it as often.
Time Slayer
Because WoW was a game where the casual players could exist on the same level as the hardcore with the only difference being gear, this caused a very distinctive split in the communities. Many casual players had no initial interest in end-game PvE, and since PvE wasn't competitive it didn't really matter. The big rifts between these communities developed when they were forced to interact, namely in a PvP environment. Battlegrounds such as the 10 vs 10 Warsong Gulch and the 40 vs 40 Alterac Valley were simply not very fun for players without raid-quality gear because they were no match for those who did have it. The power difference grew even more as the raiding progressed, but pre-raid gear never did. Blizzard has tried multiple possible solutions to these problems over the years, only one (heroics) being widely accepted by the community, the rest (Wrath of the Lich King "badges", Honor points as currency, etc...) have always angered the hardcore community. These additions which give the game's endgame content a significant boost of ease of access diminish the value of the hardcore player's time investment, alienating them and making them feel like the game is simply not being designed with them in mind.
This is very significant. RPGs have always been about character growth via time investment. If the time you invest in a character is later rendered meaningless by a future addition that makes it much easier to progress (again, Wrath of the Lich King "badges"), the only reason to ever belong to the hardcore community is to experience content first, as opposed to at all. It is extremely demoralizing knowing that the raid dungeon you've spent week after week going through, learning all the fights getting them perfect, will by the next month's content release be worthless. The rest of the player-base easily farms the same gear doing 5 man dungeons to get the same quality gear. It's less demoralizing if you're only in it for the challenge of raiding, but to anyone who values the time they invest into their characters, it becomes less and less appealing extremely fast.
The situation is interesting, however, since the hardcore community doesn't even make up a tenth of the game's playerbase: financially speaking, it makes no sense to hinder the casual playerbase in favor of them. Since it is impossible to strike a reasonable compromise between both side's grievances, the casual market will be weighted more heavily than the hardcore.
Market Slayer
WoW has the unique distinction of becoming the most successful MMORPG of all time. MMOs have the unique distinction of being very long-lasting and time consuming games, often a player will feel forced to choose a single MMO to play. This mean that any MMO that is created has to compete with WoW in a way that most other genres don't have to worry about. Because of this, MMOs have essentially halted in their evolution, since innovation is too risky to invest serious money into. Many companies simply choose to copy elements from WoW and put their own spin on it. Most do it poorly, others do it well. Still, there is serious money to be gained by hashing old ideas together and designing a pretty game to go with it, which means that an unoriginal WoW clone can still rake in lots of dough. There are some developers, however, that do take this risk: sandbox games aimed at niche markets. While they tend to stay afloat, and the companies in charge of these games make profit, they still don't compare to WoW or its more successful clones. Like EQ before it, WoW has stopped the progression of the MMORPG genre, and will continue to do so until it dies out. How that will happen is anyone's guess. It could simply die out from old age, another blockbuster MMO title could steal the spotlight, or, hell, Blizzard could simply just say they are done with the game and release a sequel. It's anyone's guess.
King Slayer
It was a simple enough idea, really. Blizzard of Starcraft, Diablo, and Warcraft fame wanted to take the MMO genre and put its own spin on it. At the time, Everquest was still the reigning king of level grinding, to dethrone such a game would be quite a feat. How did Blizzard do it? I'll tell you one thing, it wasn't WoW's content. EQ far outclassed WoW in every way when it came to content, even a full year into WoW's life. WoW became the most popular MMO for the same reason many WoW vets hate the game now. Three words: Ease of Access. That's right, WoW dethroned EQ by being easier. Is that to say that WoW was not hardcore? Of course not. WoW's raiding and PvP communities are certainly hardcore, but the leveling and questing were simple and pain-free by EQ's standards. To properly explain the stark difference between these two games, though, I have to tell you about EQ.
EQ was made while UO was still in its heyday, which meant that the big thing to copy when you're making an MMO is to make a detailed world that feels real. Making the player feel like they are actually a part of this world was the number one design philosophy in those days. To this end, EQ's questing was, well, not assisted. What does this mean exactly? No hints from the game itself, no golden punctuation marks, no giant circles on your map. The majority of quests only helped you in their quest text, which was usually cryptic at best. Now, this actually worked in EQ, since you didn't quest to level up. Leveling in EQ was a straight grind, and quests were something you did for a reward that wasn't XP, which was extremely common in MMOs pre-WoW, games like Ragnarok Online and Final Fantasy XI.
Now, to compare EQ leveling with WoW leveling. In EQ you would only kill mobs for hours on end to gain XP and level up. The style in which you killed mobs varied of course, depending on how many people you had. Common tactics included soloing, group AoE farming, and kite killing. Barring leeching and power-leveling, which require you to know people of high levels who are willing to invest time into your character, killing mobs was the only effective way to level your character until you hit end game, which usually didn't even start at level-cap (since damage level-scaling didn't really exist until WoW. Generally speaking a level 80 of class X wasn't that much different from a level 85; it was an advantage, sure, but nothing game-changing). See, other MMOs often used soft-caps to keep their players interested. A soft-cap, for those of you who don't know, is a point during a progression where the time required to progress further increases exponentially. If a game had skill X at a soft cap of 50, but a hard cap of 100, the time to get from 1 to 50 is a rather steady progression, but the time to hit 51 may take double the time, and 52 double the time of that, until it gets to the point where only 3 players ever may have hit 100.
In WoW, hitting cap was actually very fast compared to any themepark MMO that had come before it. Questing was your primary source of XP and leveling gear. Quests took you from one questing location to the next, which was rather slick for its time. In fact, because hitting cap was so relatively easy, it meant that lots of players who couldn't experience endgame content in other MMOs could in WoW. Of course that only really applies to the MMO veterans that switched to WoW. Due to WoW's ease of access, it gained a massive popularity with the casual market. The casual market, of course, had no interest in investing the time in the game to obtain raid-quality loot. The unwillingness was understandable, as many people simply don't have the time, dedication, or willingness to invest so much time raiding. There was a problem with the system as it was, though. In MMO's, you are rewarded much more by time invested in the game than personal skill. This is no less true for WoW. Casual players who wished to participate in PvP stood no chance against those who simply had more time to invest in the game. While this made sense from a mechanical perspective and from the MMO vets who were used to this format, the new players were not happy that they could not have fun in these aspects of the game because they choose not to play it as often.
Time Slayer
Because WoW was a game where the casual players could exist on the same level as the hardcore with the only difference being gear, this caused a very distinctive split in the communities. Many casual players had no initial interest in end-game PvE, and since PvE wasn't competitive it didn't really matter. The big rifts between these communities developed when they were forced to interact, namely in a PvP environment. Battlegrounds such as the 10 vs 10 Warsong Gulch and the 40 vs 40 Alterac Valley were simply not very fun for players without raid-quality gear because they were no match for those who did have it. The power difference grew even more as the raiding progressed, but pre-raid gear never did. Blizzard has tried multiple possible solutions to these problems over the years, only one (heroics) being widely accepted by the community, the rest (Wrath of the Lich King "badges", Honor points as currency, etc...) have always angered the hardcore community. These additions which give the game's endgame content a significant boost of ease of access diminish the value of the hardcore player's time investment, alienating them and making them feel like the game is simply not being designed with them in mind.
This is very significant. RPGs have always been about character growth via time investment. If the time you invest in a character is later rendered meaningless by a future addition that makes it much easier to progress (again, Wrath of the Lich King "badges"), the only reason to ever belong to the hardcore community is to experience content first, as opposed to at all. It is extremely demoralizing knowing that the raid dungeon you've spent week after week going through, learning all the fights getting them perfect, will by the next month's content release be worthless. The rest of the player-base easily farms the same gear doing 5 man dungeons to get the same quality gear. It's less demoralizing if you're only in it for the challenge of raiding, but to anyone who values the time they invest into their characters, it becomes less and less appealing extremely fast.
The situation is interesting, however, since the hardcore community doesn't even make up a tenth of the game's playerbase: financially speaking, it makes no sense to hinder the casual playerbase in favor of them. Since it is impossible to strike a reasonable compromise between both side's grievances, the casual market will be weighted more heavily than the hardcore.
Market Slayer
WoW has the unique distinction of becoming the most successful MMORPG of all time. MMOs have the unique distinction of being very long-lasting and time consuming games, often a player will feel forced to choose a single MMO to play. This mean that any MMO that is created has to compete with WoW in a way that most other genres don't have to worry about. Because of this, MMOs have essentially halted in their evolution, since innovation is too risky to invest serious money into. Many companies simply choose to copy elements from WoW and put their own spin on it. Most do it poorly, others do it well. Still, there is serious money to be gained by hashing old ideas together and designing a pretty game to go with it, which means that an unoriginal WoW clone can still rake in lots of dough. There are some developers, however, that do take this risk: sandbox games aimed at niche markets. While they tend to stay afloat, and the companies in charge of these games make profit, they still don't compare to WoW or its more successful clones. Like EQ before it, WoW has stopped the progression of the MMORPG genre, and will continue to do so until it dies out. How that will happen is anyone's guess. It could simply die out from old age, another blockbuster MMO title could steal the spotlight, or, hell, Blizzard could simply just say they are done with the game and release a sequel. It's anyone's guess.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
An Introduction to the Playground
Hello, my internet pseudonym is Zig. Like a lot of people out of there, I love MMORPGs, so much so I decided to try to maintain a blog that details my love for MMORPGs. Before I get to any meat, however, I'd like to say something and probably just pat myself on the back/shoulder/dick in possibly auto-erotic congratulations; I can't believe I got this name for the blog! It's just perfect, and hopefully I can maintain my goals and post regularly.
Onto the MEAT!
"What is this blog going to be about, Zig? So far it looks SUPER BORING."
This blog will be about MMORPGs! Nothing specific, at least not yet, just about MMOs, the core concepts, game design, all that jazz. I find the evolution of MMOs (and the current stagnation) to be fascinating. The idea of a persistent world where you can exist with other characters is fascinating to me, even after all these years. The standard model has moved far away from user generated content (SOMETHING GOES HERE TO TIE IT IN TO THE LAST SENTENCE), though the sandbox format is far from dead.
"What's all this nonsense you're spewing now? Acronyms! Terms I have no idea about! Why would I want to play a game that's a sandbox?!"
You're right, strawman, how silly of me. Let's get down to the basic of basics of MMOs. Currently, there is a sliding scale of lewdness between the extremes of "sandbox" and "theme park".
The Sandbox extreme is there is practically no developer made content. The players are simply handed tools to shape their environment around them, and thus the players are responsible for making their own fun. An example of this would be Minecraft. While Minecraft isn't an MMO it certainly relies heavily on the player's imagination to keep the game interesting. It uses elements of exploration, the sense of achievement when building, and the excitement of survival and isolation (at least in single player) to produce fun in the player's mind. The only content in the game is the randomly generated map, less than 10 monster types, ores, and crafting recipes. So far it's working great, too. I've had a blast playing Minecraft and just building dumb things like "The Great Cactus Wall of China". Minecraft really does exist near the extreme part of the spectrum though, and I really can't recall any MMO that gets close to it. This is not to say that there aren't any good sandbox MMOs, however. EVE Online, the ever popular politics simulator, and my favorite spectator sport, is quite successful while maintaining its core sandbox philosophies. It's funny to think how far the standard has changed, considering the genre's jump-off point, Ultima Online.
While not the first MMO, UO was certainly the gateway of the genre's future. Ultima Online was an online sequel for the massive Ultima series, and it was designed with the most basic RPG philosophies in mind: “Let the player do what they want”, and they did just that. There were no set in stone classes or even ways to play. You could fish for sea monsters, you could build houses, you could become a rampaging psychopath and kill everyone you encountered. The core sandbox philosophies behind UO is what made the game so charming, it felt strangely alive... until the novelty of the MMO genre started to diminish. Obviously, not many people were big fans of being in so much danger when they only wanted to play the game for recreation, by nature, the areas outside of cities were, at the very least mildly stressful for everyone involved because losing progress was so easy, it was very risky to trust people, and so to keep subscriptions up a duplicate map was created on all servers except non-consensual PvP was removed, which effectively split the population between reds and blues by putting them on different maps. There was no point to play a blue character not in the safe world, and the magic was essentially destroyed. The player-made ecosystem collapsed, and even though the game is still running today, most consider the splitting of worlds to be the death of UO.
The Theme Park extreme is there is practically no player made content.
Onto the MEAT!
"What is this blog going to be about, Zig? So far it looks SUPER BORING."
This blog will be about MMORPGs! Nothing specific, at least not yet, just about MMOs, the core concepts, game design, all that jazz. I find the evolution of MMOs (and the current stagnation) to be fascinating. The idea of a persistent world where you can exist with other characters is fascinating to me, even after all these years. The standard model has moved far away from user generated content (SOMETHING GOES HERE TO TIE IT IN TO THE LAST SENTENCE), though the sandbox format is far from dead.
"What's all this nonsense you're spewing now? Acronyms! Terms I have no idea about! Why would I want to play a game that's a sandbox?!"
You're right, strawman, how silly of me. Let's get down to the basic of basics of MMOs. Currently, there is a sliding scale of lewdness between the extremes of "sandbox" and "theme park".
The Sandbox extreme is there is practically no developer made content. The players are simply handed tools to shape their environment around them, and thus the players are responsible for making their own fun. An example of this would be Minecraft. While Minecraft isn't an MMO it certainly relies heavily on the player's imagination to keep the game interesting. It uses elements of exploration, the sense of achievement when building, and the excitement of survival and isolation (at least in single player) to produce fun in the player's mind. The only content in the game is the randomly generated map, less than 10 monster types, ores, and crafting recipes. So far it's working great, too. I've had a blast playing Minecraft and just building dumb things like "The Great Cactus Wall of China". Minecraft really does exist near the extreme part of the spectrum though, and I really can't recall any MMO that gets close to it. This is not to say that there aren't any good sandbox MMOs, however. EVE Online, the ever popular politics simulator, and my favorite spectator sport, is quite successful while maintaining its core sandbox philosophies. It's funny to think how far the standard has changed, considering the genre's jump-off point, Ultima Online.
While not the first MMO, UO was certainly the gateway of the genre's future. Ultima Online was an online sequel for the massive Ultima series, and it was designed with the most basic RPG philosophies in mind: “Let the player do what they want”, and they did just that. There were no set in stone classes or even ways to play. You could fish for sea monsters, you could build houses, you could become a rampaging psychopath and kill everyone you encountered. The core sandbox philosophies behind UO is what made the game so charming, it felt strangely alive... until the novelty of the MMO genre started to diminish. Obviously, not many people were big fans of being in so much danger when they only wanted to play the game for recreation, by nature, the areas outside of cities were, at the very least mildly stressful for everyone involved because losing progress was so easy, it was very risky to trust people, and so to keep subscriptions up a duplicate map was created on all servers except non-consensual PvP was removed, which effectively split the population between reds and blues by putting them on different maps. There was no point to play a blue character not in the safe world, and the magic was essentially destroyed. The player-made ecosystem collapsed, and even though the game is still running today, most consider the splitting of worlds to be the death of UO.
The Theme Park extreme is there is practically no player made content.
This is the side of the fence everyone's used to now, so I won't go into too much detail... hopefully. Once upon a time there were games called MUDs (multi-user dungeons). A MUD is a fully text based online RPG, these were the fathers of the Theme Park experience, they often had predetermined static dungeons, static classes and races. Everquest, made two years after UO, was designed to be a MUD with a full 3D visual component, it quickly became the most popular MMO of its time. Since Everquest popularized static classes, instances, and raiding (among other things), content being generated mostly, if not solely, by the developers has been the popular trend. Not that this is bad, mind you. There's lots of fun to be had when you're playing mainly against a world that was hand crafted by a group of developers instead of against other players (although, Everquest did have PvP servers). An example of extreme Theme Park would be the original Super Mario Bros. All levels are static, enemies appear at set locations and follow exact patterns. What the Theme Park extreme boils down to is the game becomes a sort of puzzle, where if you can solve a segment, then you pass and you may proceed, but if you can't solve it (or if you havn't done enough grinding to solve it), you are stuck until you can solve it. Like the Sandbox extreme, the Theme Park extreme doesn't really exist in MMOs, nor has it ever, since by the very nature of a game being massively multiplayer, interactions with other players generates content, be it grouping for quests, PvP, trading, or the auction house. Your experience will vary.
In the end though, most any MMO can be labeled as either Sandbox of Theme Park. These two function as sub-genres to the greater MMORPG genre, the same way 3D fighters and 2D fighters are both a sub-genre of the greater fighting game genre.
Next: WoW
In the end though, most any MMO can be labeled as either Sandbox of Theme Park. These two function as sub-genres to the greater MMORPG genre, the same way 3D fighters and 2D fighters are both a sub-genre of the greater fighting game genre.
Next: WoW
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