You Can't Always Get What You Want: Everquest, GW2, FFXIV

Syl is excited about the upcoming Heavensward expansion for FFXIV, due out this June, and who can blame her? It sounds solid and the visuals look fantastic. Like the recent addition of The Golden Saucer it pushes me to consider giving Eorzea another run, sooner or later.

GW2's Heart of Thorns, about to go into beta, also seems packed with content and visual flair, with the latest teaser for the new WvW map looking particularly intriguing. For all my carping and critiquing I'm looking forward to it very much.

Neither, however, admirable and enjoyable as they no doubt will turn out to be, is really what I think of when I hear the word "expansion". As I continue to self-examine on what MMORPGs mean to me it is becoming uncomfortably apparent that I may never again get to see a real expansion for any MMO I play.

My expectations of what to expect from an MMORPG expansion come from Everquest. I began playing in November 1999 and in less than six months the first ever EQ expansion, Ruins of Kunark, arrived. At that stage, having played with increasing fervor and dedication throughout the winter into the spring, my highest character in a game with fifty levels was somewhere in the low twenties.

Kunark accommodated me. It arrived with a vast, new continent that not only offered a huge increase in content for max-level characters, and ten whole, new levels for them to grind, but with a new race, a new starting city, four new starting zones and a full range of new open-world maps and dungeons for all level ranges.

Did you hear? Over in Eorzea they're getting flying mounts!

The first EQ expansion effectively welded an entirely new MMORPG onto the side of the existing one. It could perfectly easily have been released as a separate, standalone game. A mere eight months later almost the same thing happened again. The second EQ expansion, Scars of Velious, didn't include any new playable races or starting areas but it added another major landmass whose sprawling icefields and foreboding dungeons offered exploration and excitement for characters of all level ranges from the mid-twenties.

Still, there was considerable criticism at the time. Even such a modest step-up made the expansion seem, for some, too obviously aimed at a high-level elite. Come the third expansion, which took a whole year to arrive, SOE appeared to have taken these criticisms very much to heart.

Shadows of Luclin wasn't content just to add another continent like Kunark and Velious; it added an entire new world. Once again it came with a new race, a new starting city, new starting zones and full, fresh and complete content for every level.

In less than three years Everquest had effectively been launched and relaunched four times with expansions that might just as easily have been released as four separate, complete, self-contained MMORPGs. That was my introduction both to the genre and to the patterns of growth it entailed.

After that things began to fluctuate. Legacy of Ykesha was the first (and only) "extension pack", a much smaller and less ambitious version of the full-blown expansion. Planes of Power returned to the expected, monumentally huge scale but placed all its content firmly in the hands of characters pressing up against the "end game". Lost Dungeons of Norrath, the expansion that, for good or ill, introduced instancing to the genre, made all of its content available to every character from the late-teens onward.

The Undiscovered Land

Finally, as SoE established a breakneck, six-monthly expansion cycle, the format of expansions began to crystallize into something aimed squarely and solidly at those players who had finished the previous one and were hungry for more shinies for their high-level darlings. There was only one more attempt at a Kunark/Luclin style re-beginning;The Serpent Sea. It didn't go down very well and there's been no attempt to repeat it in the last eight years.

Well, phooey! It turns out that sprawling expansions that introduce new races and offer a whole new creation-to-cap leveling track are precisely what I really want. I want to go to a new part of the world and start all over again from scratch. I don't particularly want to take my existing characters onwards and upwards. I want to park them for a while, make new ones and womble about in the boondocks of some strange new place, making my own jerkins out of scraps of new-world leather and my arrows out of the fallen branches of strange new trees. Then eventually, when I get bored with that, I want to wake up my various stable of characters and truck them through the harder bits.

Fat chance of that. It's so inefficient, isn't it? So wasteful? Look how it spreads out the population and makes the world look empty. See how confusing it is to new players. All that duplication and redundancy; all those unused zones.

We knew no better back then, of course. Some of us even thought we were exploring. That there'd always be another continent or another world. That every new box would be the game all over again, the same game we'd bought the last time and the time before that and hoped to go on buying forever.

Well nothing lasts forever. The MMORPG expansion as I knew and loved it had a brief and spectacular flowering that faded long ago. We will not see its like again. Looking back, it's scarcely believable it happened the first time. I'm just happy I was there to see it and experience it in all its crazed glory.

So, bring on Heavensward and Heart of Thorns. If you can't get what you want sometimes you just have to make the best make of what you can get.