This weekend I spend a good deal of time in the car while driving up to see my mother-in-law.  This always serves as the launch pad for numerous conversations, one of which was a long winded rant stemmed from disappointment over Rage, but that in itself is better left for another blog post.  My wife lovingly listened in spite of not fully understanding a damned thing I was saying, however at the end she left me with a cogent nugget of advice.  “Sounds like you just might not be the target audience for these games anymore.”

Leave it to my wife, the math teacher, the being of logic… to cut through my rant and say something that makes sense.  Sure enough that little seed sat there the rest of the weekend sprouting. The more I thought on it the more I realized it had become true.  I think much of my growing dissatisfaction with the direction of games is due to this fact, that either through the changes in myself or changes in the market I am no longer the target for what is being built.

Aiming Down the Middle

The problem is the more I thought on it, the less and less certain I was there really was a target audience.  In this current era of the mega game, the current focus seems to be to cram as many features as possible into a game for as many different player bases as possible.  So in trying to create a game that appeals to raiders, casuals, explorers, achievers, role-players, pvpers, griefers, gold-farmers, campers, snipers, and crafters they try and walk a line where none of the groups get upset with the others.  But by the same token, none of them are ever actually happy.

Aiming down the middle gives you the widest swath of market share, but it also creates a thoroughly mediocre and shallow game play experience.  Dark Age of Camelot for example was a game of PVP brilliance at times, but offered some thoroughly mediocre and boring PVE game play.  Everquest II is one of the most detailed and intricate questing and PVE gaming experiences, by has never created any form of PVP worth mentioning. World of Warcraft…  well it has been all over the map, systematically ruining one aspect of the game to improve others at various points during its 7 year run.  Currently you have a mediocre but enjoyable leveling experience, and the only real stand out being the raid experience, but it suffers from the been there done that treadmill.

Trading Geek for Greed

So much focus has been placed over the last few years on widening the market to more than just traditional PC mmo gamers.  As a result there has been a general lowering of the “cost of entry” to the MMO game, reducing the learning curve.  This has had many effects on the community, and average skill level, but namely it has removed a good deal of the “geek” from the game.  Making everything seem a bit more simple, a bit more cookie cutter and in many ways less unique.

Learning how to play an MMO game took an act of effort on the player, it took a commitment to learn.  That was an unwritten commitment to the community, that they would learn how to become a member of it.  It could be overwhelming, and the number of new concepts and jargon mind boggling but as you began to “grok” them it quickly became intoxicating and you craved more knowledge.  Not only did you sell a gamer on your world, but you also sold them on MMOs for life.

Granted I don’t want to return to the era of Everquest, but I think we have gone too far.  I fear that we are replacing what were living breathing worlds, with a disposable experience that is easy to learn but equally easy to forget.  When you ask nothing of the user, it takes nothing for them to leave.  But when you give them something to work for, a path to follow, something they have to figure out on their own that isn’t always handed to them…  I have to think more often than not they will stay.

The Money Equation

One of the biggest disservices to the gamers has been the fact that gaming has shown up on the radar of big business.  It has taken a business that previously was “for gamers, by gamers” and laced it with easy venture capital money with many strings attached, and as a result success has become a zero sum game.  Games like World of Warcraft with it’s once vaunted 12 Million player subscriber base and Call of Duty: Black Ops and its 5 day $650 million dollar sales record have set wholly unrealistic goals for the rest of the industry to live up to.

The game industry would be so much healthier as a whole if there were 13 $50 million dollar games, than one $650 million record breaking game.  The need to chase the big dollars has made the game industry very risk adverse.  Stick to a pattern that works, market it towards the majority, and win.  But the problem is this same business instinct is causing some truly bizarre results.

I’ve been playing Everquest II for the last few months, and by all accounts I would call it a success.  It isn’t WoW, but it is still there and has had a pretty wide following for the last 7 years, that to me is a win in any book.  It has an extremely loyal fan base, almost zealously loyal at times, and are very clearly a niche.  Explain to me then, why on gods green earth they have decided to focus EQNext (EQIII) at the PVP Market?  Everquest 2 is not a pvp game, has never had a viable PVP vehicle, and in general nobody much cares about PVP other than a shortcut to easy loot. 

Why on earth would you alienate your already loyal fan base by targeting the new game at a market they do not care about?  The answer is simple and dumb.  They don’t have the PVP market, and on some moronic level they feel they can do what no one has done yet. They feel they can manage to create a game that is equally compelling to the modern PVP gamer and to the PVE gamer.  Even though WoW is hemorrhaging users still, it still has more users than any other MMO, and they still feel they have to compete with it.

Myth of the One True Game

One of the things that needs to die for us to get past this rut in gaming is the myth of the wow killer.  Right now World of Warcraft is definitely on the downward slope of relevancy, much as I have seen all the other once great games go through.  But those great old games never actually die, they just get stuffed off somewhere on life support.  What we need right now is games like World of Warcraft, Rift, The Old Republic, The Secret World, and Guild Wars 2 to each gain a comfortable and sustainable share of the MMO gaming market.  Sure ultimately someone will be on top, but for the health of the gaming market there needs to be less of a difference than there has been to date.

I still don’t think in this generation we are going to see much innovation in the realm of the AAA MMO title.  They are still going to firmly be rooted in the past, with Secret World and Guild Wars 2 being the notable “Great Hopes” at breaking the mold.  However I think that if we can reach a state of market share equilibrium we will finally start to see some indie development in the MMO sector.  I think the first few might be simplistic Minecraft style derivatives, but they will come eventually.  Especially with the plans Notch has for the Adventure update, I feel Minecraft itself will actually become more “Indie MMO” over time.  The MMO genre got its roots in the MUD, and I think it might just return that way.

I think Indie games and the ease of digital publication are ultimately going to be what pulls us out of the stagnation.  Sure not every game will end up a success and sell millions, but many will serve as examples and showcase the talents of the next generation of developers and designers.  Others will server to prove that yes, that plan that has been sitting on the shelf for years really could work on a larger scale and turn into the next blockbuster.  While I love playing those AAA titles (like Dragon Age II currently), I am also out there supporting those great Indie devs like Dusty Monk (I need to devote some blog space to Atomic City Adventures: The Case of the Black Dragon, it’s really fun ).  I really do think it is the Indie games that will change the dynamic.

I has been roughly three months since my last post.  With Ariad starting up his posts I figure it is high time that I get over my writers block and begin anew as well.  Thing is for me, it hasn’t truly been writers block.  There is a post I feel like I need to make, but I have been looking for every opportunity not to.  I guess, in part since I have become friendly with several of the Trion staffers, the post I feel like I need to make almost feels like a betrayal.

Maybe It Is A Bit You

It feels weird to go from completely bonkers gung ho about a game, to just having no desire to play it.  But that pretty much describes my transition from playing and actively writing about Rift, to just not logging in and eventually cancelling my account.  The problem is, for the longest time I didn’t quite understand why I no longer wanted to play.  It felt like there was something missing, that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

In my guild we had this cycle happening, that I none of us really understood.  We started the game with between thirty and forty players, so the future indeed seemed bright.  But as each new player managed to top the hill and hit 50, they all seemed to slowly begin tapering off their playtime.  So much so that eventually they just started disappearing all together.  As the months went on, it became harder and harder to maintain an active grouping force due to folks just dropping off into the ether.

At that point I was still doing pretty good, I had t1 geared my first 50 and was well on my way to my second 50.  It was on my way to the third, that finally it started to hit me.  Having done these zones 5 or more times, considering the time spent in beta… I just could not force myself to push through it a third time.  All the while, I am not really understanding what is going on, only that my desire to play at all is waning.  There were many a night that I logged in, and ran around Meridian for an hour or so before finally logging out for the evening, not actually doing anything.

The Missing Fluff

The game is an amazingly fun rollercoaster ride the first time or two, but as I sat at level 50 with nothing that I wanted to do, something Ariad said hit me like a ton of bricks.  He was one of the first to taper off and eventually leave the game, and I will do my best to paraphrase what we talked about.  Essentially he said that one of his biggest problems with the world is that everything exists for a reason.  At first this comment didn’t make much sense, but as I sat at 50 bored… it finally did.

In most games, there are elements of the game that exist there, just to be there.  There are empty buildings in towns, there are art elements you can hover over that say interesting things, books in dungeons, etc that exist just to add flavor to the world.  In Rift, as the player you get a feel that nothing was added to the world that is not directly tied to some quest.  Essentially the game is this great lean core of mechanics, but it is missing the fluffy padding that adds atmosphere and gives players a reason to fall in love with something other than the game play.

The storyline of the game is very well written, and I’ve become friends with some of the lore writers in this process.  They do a phenomenal job providing the connective tissue that holds the world together.  The problem is, the world just doesn’t feel alive.  Sure there is dynamic content in the form of Rifts, but none of the cities FEEL like cities.  Neither Meridian or Sanctum feel like they could actually support life.  They both feel like Military outposts more than actual living, breathing cities.  The scale of the world I guess, just feels off in some way.

Maybe It Really Is Me

One of the other things at work here is that I personally have changed as a player, from the beginnings of Rift beta.  When I started playing Rift, I was the leader of a 600 character guild and an active raider.  Rift literally was everything I ever said I wanted in a game.  Had it been released two years ago, before I had become horribly bitter and jaded towards raiding, then I think I would be gobbling it up left and right.

The problem is this, that me leaving WoW was a much bigger change in my life than I ever expected.  Imagine being the core support for a large guild, and them needing something from you each and every night you chose to play, which in my case was literally every night.  Imagine holding up a bridge, being friend, councilor, advisor, and mentor for 6 1/2 long years of constant interaction.  Imagine logging in each and every night to 10-20 tells, each of them wanting something different.  Then all the sudden, imagine it all going away and leaving nothing but blissful peace.

As much as I gradually morphed from a casual player, to a serious raider, I have changed back almost completely.  In Rift, much of the pay off at the end of the day is the massive amount of raid content.  Problem is, if you don’t care about raiding, all of this carefully tiered content quickly looks like yet another grind you have to suffer through.  This was multiplied by the fact that two separate times that I can remember, the cost of all of the tiered gear was increased by a large percentage. 

So flat out, for someone who was slow gearing, it is much harder to get ready for raiding than it was those first few months.  As we began dipping our toes in raiding, it became evident quickly that simply put we did not have the gear levels necessary.  Biggest issue was that with everyone tapering off their playtime and only being around for raids, there was no time to run the instances needed to improve the overall gear level.

Same As It Ever Was

I was in the camp of players who warned against the inclusion of a dungeon tool.  If you have read any of my blog posts in the past, I tie the death of WoW back to the creation of the dungeon finder.  It was the single act that destroyed server communities.  I went into Trion’s decision to create a dungeon finder with an open mind, thinking that the Rift community thus far had been better than WoW and surely "we" could use it responsibly.  The problem is, we were all wrong.

In those first weeks after release, as folks topped out the level 50 channel became an active hot bed of conversation and grouping.  Within a few minutes you were able to assemble a t1 or t2 expert with players actively looking.  I am sure the experience for folks unwilling to go through the legwork of actually doing the forming is different, but quickly our guild built a steady group of regulars from other similar guilds.  Folks knew each other and had a long list of folks to substitute in if someone needed to go and the community as a whole flourished.

When the dungeon tool went in, for the first few weeks everything was pretty good.  At this point I was gearing up my rogue, and had both a bard and marksman spec actively playing whichever role the group needed of me.  In tier 1s, everything was great, and folks were willing to work together.  However when I made the transition to Tier 2 instances, the world around me changed.  I started seeing some of my old enemies from WoW, "the elitist" and "the rage quit" on a nightly basis.  I went from being able to run instances in an hour and a half to spending 4 hours in a tier 2 and never actually finishing it.

From what I have heard from guild members still active in the game, with the inclusion of cross server queues to the dungeon finder it has gotten worse.  All of the things that made running dungeons in WoW a frustrating experience are apparently now in Rift.  The power pulling egotistical tanks, the dps that cannot keep up and the dps that calls everyone that doesn’t meet their standards a failure.  I was on mumble the night the tool went in and heard tales of the very first group a guild member tried complaining at him to "pull big" just like they always did in Warcraft.  My ultimate fear is, that once again the dungeon tool has wrecked what was an amazing community.

I Still Have Faith

I am sure this probably seems like a flash back to the way I talked about WoW when I left, but honestly I feel like I am parting on good terms with the game.  The prime difference is, by the time I left WoW I had lost any measure of faith that Blizzard had a clue what they were doing, a trend that has continue on since then.  With Trion however, I have all the faith in the world as the company, part of the reason why I delayed this post is I did not want to contribute to any bad press about the game for the longest time.  Problem is, I have been deadlocked and unable to write much of anything until I got this one off my chest.

Trion has done so much right with Rift, and have an amazing group of people behind it.  I’ve come to know a good number of them, and each and every one really cares about the end product and is actively fighting to make it better for all of the players.  Erick "Zann" Adams for example is one of the absolute hardest working Community Managers I have ever seen.   LM Lockhart and Nicholas McDowell have done an amazing job reaching out to the community, and keeping the lore pot stirred to whip up interest.  Never before have I seen the level of interaction with the bloggers and social media that I have from Trion.

All of this said, I have all the faith in the world that they will figure out what exactly is missing from the game eventually, and add that final spark.  It makes it all the more bittersweet for me when I realize that I just don’t want to play it anymore.  I gave the game six months, and my subscription will be running out soon.  I wish them all the luck in the world on the game.  It was an amazing ride to 50, but there just wasn’t enough there to hold me after I reached the top of the hill.  With all the plans for player housing on the radar, and the new zones, I feel like it might push them over this hump and bring the much needed fluff to the game.

Moving On

I figure at some point in the future, I will fire the game back up and give it a spin.  It still has more right going for it than it has wrong, and those games I tend to remember fondly are the ones I end up going back to time and again.  This is evidenced by the fact that I am back playing Everquest II, a game I beta tested, and have played 4 different times since release.  Since I realized it was the fluff that I was craving, I went to the fluffiest game on the market as a counter reaction.

I am honestly having a blast.  I tested the game from early in beta, and when it came time for release the majority of my friends were going to WoW, so that is where I went as well.  However being an Everquest player for three years, made me a huge fan of the world of Norrath.  It has always felt more alive and vibrant that just about any other game setting.  In the past however when I played it, it was a side game while I was also playing WoW.  I would enjoy myself, but sooner or later the rigor of leading a guild would catch up to me.  Time and time again I would begin feeling like I was shirking my duties to my friends and guild mates.

This is the first time for me to play the game with nothing else siphoning away my time.  As a result I am probably having more fun with it than I have in the past.  My main is now level 71 and I am really enjoying Mistmoore Catacombs at the moment.  Expect to see a good number more posts about that game going forward.  I will probably also be reskinning the site to be something a bit more game neutral.  I am still playing a good bit of Minecraft, so I toyed around with the idea of trying to create the "Tales of the Aggronaut" logo in Minecraft for flair. 

Now that I have all this off my chest, I hope I can go back to regular writing.

Been a long while since Bel or I have posted. Call it the mid-late summer doldrums. I’ve also been extremely busy for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here, which has left me kind of sapped. My apologies.

Lately, though, it’s been summer convention season, with a lot of exciting things being shown off. If you haven’t seen the trailer for Wild Star, you should watch it. Here:

It’s every cliché trope wrapped up in awesome foil and made to look GREAT. There’s nothing new here, we’ve seen these characters before, we’ve seen things done this way, but it doesn’t matter because the trailer looks great, the world looks compelling, and there’s something here for everyone. I want to keep watching this, and see what happens next.

Sci-fi not your thing? Here, have some fantasy, Guild Wars 2 style:

Like It Always Was, But Different

I love the way these games are shaping up. I don’t have a good trailer handy, but Star Wars: The Old Republic has a similar level of polish and fun on display. These aren’t sandbox MMOs, no, not even Guild Wars. You play them and you know – you can feel – the WoW influence, the EQ influence, the this-is-an-MMO sense that permeates, well, every game in this genre.

I look at those games and I get excited to play them. They’re not what blew me away, though. What blew me away were these:

First person shooter? But Ariad, all of those are the same, it looks just like Medal Call of Honor Duty! And Guild Wars 2 looks just like WoW. There’re subtle differences, and it makes for a surprisingly deep game. This will be incredibly fun with friends, and notably it’ll be a pop-in-and-out experience, something I can play for fun without a huge time commitment. For a different spin on the same concept, here’s Tribes:

Another shooter, only future instead of military. Easy to dismiss as “another FPS, yawn”, except that the feel of this one is so different from other games that it’s worthy of mention. I’m not a huge shooter player, but I played the old Tribes, and reports from PAX Prime are that the new one plays a LOT like the old ones. For anyone who remembers the old, this is a very, very good thing. Looking for a bit more story? Have a dose of Nathan Drake:

The Uncharted series are some of the best games released in the past few years. I would happily put Uncharted 2 and Portal head to head for fun factor. It’s basically Indiana Jones, the video game, done RIGHT. The fact that they’re PS3 exclusives makes it hard to casually get into them if you don’t own the console, but they’re brilliant examples of what’s available on console that you just can’t get on PC (I’m trolling Bel here).

The main thing that excites me is the variety. I haven’t even talked about Skyrim (and I’m out of video slots here, so I can’t post a video), but in terms of available games to play, we’re looking at some really, really awesome opportunities (and great things that have already come out—I’m looking at you, Bastion and Deus Ex).

Everything Under the Sun

I used to avoid entire genres of games. I skipped over Halo (and all console shooters) entirely, because I fervently believed that “it was better on PC”. It wasn’t until I’d been working on a console shooter for about a year before I really broke that bias, and shortly thereafter I discovered some really fun experience (and was prepared for the awesomeness that was Bioshock).

I refused to play platformers that didn’t have Mario in the title for ages, figuring that none of them would be any good. I nearly missed out on Prince of Persia, and I completely missed out on Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank, both awesome games that I wasn’t in the right place at the right time to fully enjoy.

I’ve been amazed at how much fun there is to be had even in games I expect to hate. It’s also made me a lot better at seeing what games are, rather than what I want them to be. It’s a hard thing to apply to MMOs—I really want to see an MMO with real, true open-world and deep character customization, complete with well-implemented player housing and a sense of ownership… but SWTOR is not that game. Guild Wars 2 is not that game.

They’re gonna be fun, though. LOTS of fun, if I can enjoy them for what they are, rather than obsessing over what they’re not.

Today I read Tobold (http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2011/06/syncaine-on-accessibility.html) and Syncaine (http://syncaine.com/2011/06/16/accessibility-killed-rift/) talking about accessibility in MMOs. It’s a neat series of reads on both sides of the issue, and I feel like they’re both touching on a big issue in MMO development that’s been going on basically since WoW brought in a massive influx of new players (thanks to being highly accessible, even in Vanilla) – not enough content.

It has nothing to do with how ‘casual’ or ‘hardcore’ or ‘accessible’ the content is, and everything to do with whether or not the existing content in the game satisfies the demands of the various players. WoW only has one content path. You level, you do dungeons, you do heroic dungeons, you do raids, you do heroic raids. These five experiences are different in a lot of ways; the number of players you have being the most obvious one, but the approach to playing and the kind of players each pursuit attracts is quite different. However, it’s a linear path. Syncaine hits the nail on the head in his post when it mentions that players are satisfied and at their best when they have content to play that challenges them and can look forward to more content ahead of them. It’s an idea spread out across quite a bit of the argument, but to me it’s the underlying thread that separates him from the usual “games should be harder” hardcore crowd.

Something for Everyone

In most of the major MMO releases, including both the successful and the unsuccessful, there’s a single, brutally defined and linear path of content. You level until you can do small-group content, you do small group content and level until you reach max level, you do max-level dungeons, and then you raid. When you have exhausted one of the pre-raid forms of content, you’re done with it; you will rarely if ever see more of that content that’s meaningful to you.

I have a theory about MMO content: If you, as a development studio, had an infinite amount of time and resources to create an endless stream of content for every type of player, you would see a few paths that were highly favored. You’d see solo content, small group (4-6 players), small raid (10-15 players), and massive raid (50-100+ players) standing far and away ahead of the rest as favored types of content. WoW proved that 25-man content was more popular than 40-man content, and furthermore that 10 was at least as popular if not more popular than 25-man. The inevitable argument is that it’s easier to put together the smaller groups, so they’re naturally more popular, which I absolutely agree with. People are more inclined to play when playing is less onerous, and more inclined to do content when the barrier to entry is low. Accessibility is one thing—but accessibility need not mean “easy”, which is the mistake both Tobold and Syncaine point out in their articles.

Imagine if an MMO devotedly created endgame content for the solo player, the small group player, and the raider simultaneously, where you could realistically progress your character via any of those means without being forced to do the others. “Yeah, that’d be great, Ariad, but it’s totally unreasonable—WoW can barely keep up with player progression through content NOW, much less if they supported three or more different paths.” I can hear you thinking it.

Doing the Impossible

Looking at the way WoW and Rift and other MMOs are built, it’s really easy to scoff at the idea of continual content for everyone. Let’s look at the accessibility issue from a fresh slate, though, throw out everything we know about MMO progression, and break the problem down into parts.

1.) We should have enough content for the solo player, the small group player, and the raider to feel satisfied.

2.) We need to be able to expand all of those lines of content in a way that makes sense.

3.) We want content that is challenging to people at various skill levels, without artificial-feeling “modes”.

4.) We need to be able to build all of this without breaking the bank in terms of time or resources.

One of the things that takes a massive amount of time in the production of an MMO is the leveling process. It takes more time than any other form of content, arguably all other forms of content combined. Given this, it should come as no surprise that things suddenly change when players are finished with the leveling process—it’s basically impossible to keep up, especially because players are trained to burn through “leveling” as fast as possible.

So, let’s remove it.

An MMO Without Levels

Defining what content is available by levels causes a number of problems. For players who enjoy the soloing game, when they hit max level the game is functionally over for them—they have no reason to keep playing because the content that they enjoy is now over. They can roll a new character, but a lot of times, the new character is going to be playing through the same content. Not exactly ideal. For players who enjoy raiding, nothing before hitting max level is meaningful in the slightest—they care about raiding and are forced to slog through content for quite some time (days? weeks? months?) before getting to the content they want to play.

Why not cut out the concept of levels entirely, and let people do what they like best immediately upon playing? A short tutorial area may be helpful, but from a development standpoint you’re creating content that’s relevant for every player in your game, theoretically, and this content can be tuned to be quite difficult, because there are *always* alternatives (because you’ve spent the entire leveling-process budget on content that people find useful at max level). Without the artificial constraints of level, advancement becomes a question of resources (money), gear, and unlocked skills and abilities, all of which can be safely unhooked from something like levels. An established raiding guild can start the game and immediately start raiding, with content that’s meaningful to them and worth their while, without any of the intermediate content that they have no interest in.

The nice thing about a setup like this is that you can tune your content to be as difficult as you like—players are always accomplishing something meaningful so making your leveling content easy (so that raiders can get to raid content) or your raiding content easy (so that players who have finished leveling and need something to do don’t get crushed by hard raid content that they aren’t interested in) is entirely unnecessary—players can find the challenges best suited to their skills, without an artificial enforced hierarchy determining what they can and can’t do, and without a need to homogenize difficulty so that people with differing interests can all play.

You don’t need to make raid content for non-raiders, or leveling content for people who hate leveling. Instead, you just have content, and players play what they like.