Random aside before I get into the meat of the topic this morning. Apparently it is my 11th anniversary on Twitter this morning, or probably more likely later this afternoon. Twitter and blogging have forever been inextricably linked. I joined Twitter for better engagement with other bloggers and creators, and wound up staying there because I found a terribly interesting and engaging gaming community. Sure there was a challenge in trying to hold a conversation in what was then 144 characters at a time, but somehow we managed to string together some pretty interesting topics. Now that we have proper threading, longer character counts, and @ing in people not eating up all of the conversation space, it is staggering just how much easier it is to hold a proper discussion.
Which leads me to a segue to the topic at hand, which actually came up yesterday in a Twitter thread but has also been something I have been discussing with the AggroChat folks. Each time I see a new game advertised as a massively multiplayer sandbox survival game, I have to resist rolling my eyes back into my head. This is a design pattern that budding designers seem to think they can make work, but so rarely does. They set out with this ideal of simulating a realistic world with consequences and one that forces interesting decisions to be made for the sake of survival. What ends up happening is either a barren wasteland that no one is playing or a brutal and toxic kill box that eats anyone who did not start on day one or does not have the fortitude to wade through a river of feces to get to a stable place.
There is a very vocal minority of players that will scream at devs about wanting the ability to kill other players and loot their corpses, but what they really mean is that they want to prey on the weak. So a new game is released with a bunch of tantalizing world building elements or intricate crafting systems, which draws in players like myself that have always wanted an interesting modern PVE sandbox experience. Then like blood in the water the gank squad shows up to ruin everyone’s day. My working theory is that this is effectively the same group of players that show up in every new game. Much like FPS players are fickle and will flock to whatever title has the most traction, the gank squad shows up in whatever environment they feel has the most hapless noobs.
It begins a cycle of these player killers making life hell on the PVE populace until they ultimately log out never to return. I still remember the opening weekend for ArcheAge there was a quest that involved having to cross a bay in a rowboat to continue the storyline. Lined up were a bunch of players with massive ships that would do nothing but ram into the poor innocent rowboats and sink them. Eventually I logged out and decided that the game just wasn’t for me, and perpetuated the cycle. The gank squad flocks to these fertile hunting grounds and once their toxic behavior has turned them fallow, they move on to the next new hot game trying to make this design pattern work. The PVE player wanders off feeling frustrated and swearing that they will never go through this process again… only to be lured later by some killer feature in an otherwise frustrating game.
The funny thing is in my experience if you return to those same games six months later, what has grown up from the dead earth is often times a thriving oasis of cooperative players that more or less ignore the player versus player aspect of the game. Some two years after the launch of ArcheAge I returned to the game and found that I could roam freely and enjoy the world for what it was. Sure it was hell trying to find a plot of land since those had long ago been snapped up in the process, but I managed enjoy the leveling process without ever encountering another hostile player in the process. From what I understand from friends currently playing Sea of Thieves the same thing is happening there, and they ran treasure missions without encountering another hostile ship throughout the weekend.
Ultimately my question is… why do companies keep trying to make the PVP and PVE elements work together? If it is actual player combat that folks are craving, then they are far better served by a game that ONLY supports player versus player engagement. However that is not what the gank squad wants. They want unfair fights where they roll in and “pwn noobs” and then laugh about how weak their prey ultimately is. So when I hear complaints on forums about there not being enough players engaging in a system like “war mode” from Battle for Azeroth, what I am actually hearing is that there are not enough lambs to slaughter for the gank squad to get their jollies. The players who actually care about challenging combat are off playing games that are solely focused on player versus player engagement. The folks that want to feel powerful as they dominate the weak… well they roam off to the next new game looking for victims.
To answer my own question, the reason why these games keep trying to make this work is that player versus player engagement is effectively free content. Story driven content is time consuming and thus costly to make. However dropping a bunch of players into a kill box looks enticing because the theory is that the players will ultimately create their own content. Visions of giant continent wide battles dance in the designers head as they envision players creating complex social structures as they duke it out in multi-tiered warfare. This didn’t even work in the games that folks hold up with praise like Dark Age of Camelot, because ultimately one faction became so dominant on a specific server that it forced a defacto alliance between the other two factions if they had any hopes of delaying the slaughter.
Ultimately I welcome continent wide battles… but I want those battle to be waged with intricately crafted NPC factions and not a bunch of random players. Where I get hung up with playing games that have open flagging for player combat is that I could have a lovely evening where I get a bunch of things accomplished that I wanted to. However equally likely is that I will be minding my own business and wander across a band of player killers and wind up logging out of the game rather than trying to recover my body while dealing with the spawn camping. At its core, I don’t like the idea of having my fun impacted by other players. I realize in an PVE game I might have this sort of impact when I queue for a dungeon and people are assholes. However there are plenty of other activities I can do entirely solo that dilute those negative interactions. When engagement with the world alone paints a target on my back, I find it really hard to get hyped about going through those motions.
I would love to see some of these games that really no longer have active player killer populations simply remove that functionality from the game entirely. Taking your otherwise interesting game with PVE sandbox mechanics, and making it “safe” for players who want no part in the other aspects would be essentially igniting a beacon to those of us who had been avoiding it. Hell even having a PVE only server would go a long ways. I mentioned Dark Age of Camelot earlier, and the moment they opened Gaheris which was the co-op server I re-rolled there without a second thought. That server was an awesome thriving environment of folks who wanted to engage in the awesome PVE and raiding content in the game, but wanted nothing to do with the battleground experience. If it worked so well in the game that everyone holds up as the pinnacle of making a PVP game engaging, it can pretty much work in any game.
I still feel like there is effectively a single loud mouthed PVP Gank Squad that roams from game to game, and an ocean of PVE only players that are turned off by them existing. It seems like it would make business sense to create those PVE only servers that players ask for. I admit a lot of my lack of excitement over the Fallout 76 changes are knowing that there is a slim chance of my enjoyment being adversely effected by some other player as I wander the wasteland. I was originally not interested at all in the New World until they took a massive uturn and moved away form the multiplayer kill box concept. I’ve avoided Sea of Thieves similarly because while I am fine with a piracy simulator, I want to be engaged with interesting NPCs and not running away from players. Similarly I have always been interested in the Dark Zone in The Division, but have avoided it like the plague because I don’t want to engage in combat with other players. Each time I bring up these points I realize how not alone in this line of thinking I am, as was the case on Twitter yesterday. Surely there is a market here that is more or less being ignored by the constant striving for a design pattern that doesn’t actually seem to work.
Given that this has been going on so long, I’d have to question our perception of the profitability of these games from the PvE player’s perspective. PVE players frequently take the position that they represent the majority and would be far more profitable to serve, yet year after year the great majority of new multiplayer online games feature some form of open world pvp, usually these days with survival mechanics as well.
Unless all these developers are just plain ignorant, they presumably know something we don’t. I’m guessing that’s the expected relationship between the cost of building a PvE only game that can also hold an audience sufficiently large to turn a profit versus making one of these, where players provide much of the “content” at no ongoing cost. In other words, we get these games because they represent less potential economic risk. That the games then become homes for PvE players at a later stage of development may well allow for the depreciated costs by that stage and by the fact that considerably less investment in new content is expected. Perhaps that is part of the expected and intended life of the game.
On ArcheAge, I also wonder whether you were just unlucky? I played it at launch, playing it purely as a PvE title, and I don’t think I ever saw any PvP at all, although I did see a lot of people being annoying in PvE, dragging ships into towns and the like. I think I played for about a month and posted about it a few times and from what I remember about all I wrote about was questing and leveling. Black Desert was the same, although there I saw no idotic behavior.
My personal feeling about it is that I get quite bored quite quickly with sandboxes. I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t stick around for long in any kind of sandbox, PvE, PvP or hybrid. If you’re going to make a theme park, though, then yes, I’d prefer to have the PvE kept quite separate from the PvE. GW2 and ESO manage that very well, whereas Allods, to my way of thinking, doesn’t.
Crowfall, which you have as an illustration, is an interesting one. As far as I can tell that is about 90% a pure PvP game but it what is effectively PvE housing, and the Housing part is free to play. I’m not sure that’s been tried before. Could be interesting. Ashes of Creation should be a bit more like DAOC, as far as I can tell. Not sure how consensual or avoidable the PvP is there. A much bigger problem with both of those than any design choices over PvP seems to be the incredibly long development times. By the time they finally release I’m not sure I’ll care any more.
I think part the allure for devs, the reason it keeps coming up, is the idea of self-generating content, which is the holy grail of PvP. If you can just do that you do not need as much dev time/expense to keep the ball rolling, at least in theory. But there is such a narrow line between PvP players being frustrated that they cannot kill anything that moves and PvE players tiring of getting ganked. PvP MMORPGs tend to flame out if they don’t find that balance, or toss in with PvE and then lose their PvP edge.
One thing I always find interesting is that people seem to get a lot more upset at being killed by another player than an NPC. I have wondered if you could tell somebody convincingly that, say, EVE Online is a single player game and that all those other “players” are just AI driven if they would have a different reaction to the game than they do when they know a person blew them up.
I am not exactly sure who to reply to because in theory this is a bit you Bhagpuss and a bit Wilhelm, but I agree that the key motivation for PVP focused games is that they require less development to get out the door and up and running. On one hand I have questioned if I am just seeing things only from my narrow viewpoint as a carebear, however it does seem that every heavily PVP based MMORPG seems to struggle to find an audience. Whereas games like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV and The Elder Scrolls Online seem to keep a reasonably solid level of interest in the player base. I view ESO as an example of a game that pivoted since the first expansion content was the Imperial City, which is effectively a big kill box and in the subsequent releases they have dug further and further into complete story driven content.
I think the developers get caught up in a vision and in doing so can be oblivious to the actual market. I’ve seen so many statements of late that are similar to this one about Fallout 76 and the devs being perplexed that the players were not interested in PVP.
“Well, I mean at the end of the day, our intention was always, we’re going to put this out there, see what folks think, and then cater the stuff that we do later to their reaction. So, for example, I think we were a little surprised how few people wanted to take part in PvP and how many more they were interested in PvE together. As opposed to, ‘I want to test my mettle against you and let’s get into a duel.’ There’s some folks who do, don’t get me wrong, but I think it’s a smaller percentage of our player base than we thought.”
I see that statement and wonder if anything from the community was filtering into the development bubble? I remember a constant refrain of folks asking for PVE only ruleset servers, or at least the ability to host their own servers where they could control the rules. Yet if you believe that statement, they were confused when they saw that nobody really wanted to kill each other and instead wound up collaborating and helping each other out on taking down the bigger and harder content? Similarly there is an interesting quote from the folks at Bioware talking about how apparently no one actually wanted to play the renegade path and almost everyone played paragon. I think both speak to a fundamental nature of players for the most part wanting to do the right thing, and that the toxic behavior representing a relatively small number of players in the end.
I think PVP sandboxes MMORPGS are for the most part a “wouldn’t it be cool” scenario that never quite pans out and that no one really wants.
I always feel a little odd on this topic as I play EVE Online, which has a reputation as a horrible gank box, yet doesn’t feel nearly as bad to me as some of the fantasy sandbox PvP titles. Part of that is that gear (ships and equipment) just aren’t as important in EVE. They are more like ammo to be expended than raid gear you spent months trying to get only to lose it to a gank. You can refit with ISK, and if you don’t have enough, you can go earn some pretty safely.
Fantasy MMO PvP I avoid except in very controlled circumstances, like battlegrounds. I thought war mode in WoW was hilarious. It was billed as bringing PvP to all servers, but it effectively made every server a PvE server because screw trying to quest a bit in the evening only to have some geared up twink lock on to you and camp the respawn point.
I am always a bit surprised not that there is such a vocal PvP audience in the forums of every game, but that devs keep taking their volume as a representation of their size as an audience. As with war mode, when you give most people the option they seem to steer away from getting ganked constantly.
One only needs to look at the example of Worlds Adrift and the ongoing example of Legends of Aria to see where making a “freely open world” fails and where tonal shifts can make things worse.
Worlds Adrift essentially told people to “git gud” when first facing backlash for its lawless world, and then by the time they pivoted to include more PvE elements, it was already too late. As for Legends of Aria, this game has pivoted its stance on open PvP so many times that people who have been in-game since launch don’t seem to know what it wants to do with regard to player conflict.
Ultimately, if you want to make a PvP game, make that first and foremost. If you want to make a PvE game, make that first and foremost. These two playstyles are very often not the peanut butter and chocolate combination devs hope for