Serial Entertainment

Altism Required

Yesterday I made  statement on twitter about how much I appreciated how good the overall pacing of Warlords of Draenor has been.  This is especially evident as I quite literally played my 7th character through the Tanaan Jungle sequence, and I am still not bored with it.  The pacing of the content has these moments where you are “called to action” and moments allowing you to chill out and faff about for awhile.  Granted the entire system is riddled with moments of faff, but I enjoyed the fact that these were built in when following the main story arc as well.  Most of my friends agreed with me, but one in particular chimed in stating that they had run out of things to do in the expansion. It seems they don’t play alts, and don’t consider playing alts to be “content”.  I can totally get where they are coming from, because if I only played a single character I would be bored as hell already.  I feel however that alting is the only way an MMO becomes playable past that originally one to three month burst.

We as a whole are content locusts.  We swoop in and gorge ourselves on the content and then get frustrated when the companies cannot churn out enough content to satiate our voracious appetites.  I’ve heard reports that the folks building SWTOR truly believed they had six months worth of content ready for the players at launch… and it took me exactly two weeks to have played through all it on my first character, and I felt like I kept a rather sedate pace.  The sad truth of MMO gaming is that no company will ever be able to churn out content fast enough for the most dedicated of players.  Guild Wars 2 has come the closest with their living story campaign, but all of that was essentially disposable content that evaporated when the next chunk went in.  I feel like Alting and ease of alting is really the only salvation for keeping players in a game for more than a few months.

Serial Entertainment

I feel like the issue with MMO content is that we tend to view things in terms of an expansion rather than a constant gradual progression.  The expansion cycle for the most part needs to be abolished, and instead steal something that tell tale games does exceptionally well.  I feel like episodic gaming might hold the key to salvation for the MMO genre.  What players really want is something new and exciting to do every month, and major progression of the main story every few months.  Right now there is exactly on game giving us this, and that is Final Fantasy XIV.  More or less since launch it has released a major patch every three months and a minor patch every month.  This has not been an exact thing but it has worked out to be roughly those intervals.  Essentially there is always something major looming on the horizon for players to “please look forward to”.  Then in the meantime there are little quality of life things going on so that it feels like you are still moving forward even if you are not quite to the next major mile marker.

The thing is… even in Final Fantasy XIV Alting is a big part of the game play.  They however disguise this fact with the job system.  The problem with Alting in most games is that when you are playing your alts you have essentially been forced to abandon all progress made on your main character.  I feel like Blizzard realized this was a problem early on, and started making various things account wide like mounts and pets.  The problem is their model simply was not designed for everything to be handled at an account based level.  Final Fantasy XIV on the other hand was designed from the ground up to be a single character game.  With that one character you can learn every single job out there and every profession as well.  This gives that one character infinite replayability.  Want to be a healer… then switch to your healer job, need to tank…  switch to your tank job.

Same Problem Exists

Where the job system breaks down however is similarly… there just is not enough quest content to go around.  You have enough quests to get one, maybe two jobs to 50 before you have exhausted all that is available to you.  They are constantly putting in new storyline for the level 50 characters to play through, but there is nothing new available for players to level new jobs with.  There are of course job related quests every 5 levels… but the time between is spent grinding in one way or another. Essentially to level jobs once you have finished with your quests you are left with either chain running dungeons, grinding fates or grinding levequests.  All of which are tolerable, but none of which are actually all that enjoyable.  So we are back to the classic MMO conundrum of needing more quest content than is available, the problem specifically being here that we need low to mid level quests.

So while I feel like treating an MMO as though it were a television show is a good idea… the problem is that you not only need to expand the top end content… you also need to keep adding stuff for players to do in the middle.  Alts are not a perfect solution, but they are the solution that seems to work for me in order to keep me engaged with a game.  Ultimately there is a point where I feel like I have leveled everything that I care to level…  but that buys me more time in the game than I would were I simply sticking to a single character.  I always have these grand sweeping ideas like that I want to level “one of everything” but I never quite make that goal.  Ultimately there are some things that I just don’t enjoy…  as evidenced by my string of casters never actually making it to the level cap.  I don’t consider alting “content” persay, but it is a patch that keeps me engaged in the world and I am willing to employ it as a way of staving off boredom.