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Shintar has a post up under the declarative title SWTOR's Endgame Is Alts, Not Gear. I haven't played Star Wars: the Old Republic for a long while but the post immediately started me thinking about the way my own gaming habits have changed. I left a lengthy comment but as I was typing I realized I had more to say, hence this post.

Shintar contends that "SWTOR is and has always been a game about alts." She's referring mainly to the (in)famous "Fourth Pillar" on which Bioware rested all their hopes for the game: story. As Shintar says, the game "launched with eight unique class stories, and you better believe that the devs didn't intend for you to only play one of them!"

In the early years of the mmorpg genre, story was nowhere near as central to the experience as it's become. I have very mixed feelings about the whole concept of narrative storytelling in live service games I don't believe it's a good fit at all for a number of reasons.

For one thing, every long-running game with an ongoing storyline featuring recurring characters risks turning into a bad soap opera. The longer the game lasts, the more convoluted, contrived and contradictory the backstories of the major players become. Every time I read another blogger bemoaning the sorry state of World of Warcraft's storyline I'm reminded of the decades when I followed the soaps and how in the end I had to stop because, while I could remember the past, the characters clearly couldn't.

Even in the rare games where the writers manage to maintain a degree of consistency, there's the Everything Everywhere All At Once issue. Since players react negatively to having any content taken away, even if it's content they'll never use again, every storyline has to remain in the game and playable, leading to a broken reality. 

Most devs just ignore it, which is probably for the best. ArenaNet eventually came out and stated that each map in Guild Wars 2 exists in some kind of temporal stasis, a snapshot of frozen time, a solution I find as inelegant as the problem it purports to resolve. Blizzard have tried a number of fixes, from the deeply unpopular revisionism of the Cataclysm expansion, through heavy-handed use of phasing to the recent introduction of Chromie Time. None of it really helps all that much.

SW:tOR probably made more problems for itself than most by leaning so heavily on the concept of multiple storylines. GW2 had already gone some of the way down the same road with the Personal Story, a narrative that had the odd characteristic of branching inward, starting out like a delta, streams flowing not just from each race but from a number of choices made at character creation, before all the streams joined together into one not-really-all-that-mighty river, sweeping every player over the same final cataract.

Shintar is clearly correct when she suggests Bioware didn't do all that work for nothing. If you go to the trouble of commissioning eight separate narratives to take players from creation to cap you certainly don't do it for redundancy. Had the game been as commercially successful as they hoped, perhaps all those narratives would have continued to expand indefinitely. Then there would have been less need to find alternative ways of keeping the hardcore happy.

Story, though, may be something of a distraction if we're talking about the choice between alts and
endgame. In the years when few mmorpgs even pretended to have anything you could call a narrative arc, many devs still seemed to expect players to create and level multiple characters. If not, why put so much time and effort into designing multiple starting areas and levelling paths? 

In part it has to be because leveling was originally seen almost as much as a goal as it was a means to an end(game). For many years, while I was playing anything up to forty hours a week, I wasn't leveling characters to get to anything or anywhere. I was leveling them because leveling was the game.

At the very beginning, mmorpgs didn't really come with much in the way of pre-designed endgame content, anyway. The levelling process itself took so long that many players would spend their entire time in a given game without ever reaching the level cap, let alone settling down there. It would have been seen as a poor use of resources to create content few players could access.

As the months and years passed and the games carried on, finding things to do for the increasing number of players who'd reached the cap became much more of a priority. That was how we got endgame zones, raiding and gear grinds. I doubt any of it was planned. It certainly didn't seem like it at the time. 

Once the pattern was set, though, it was set in stone. As Shintar says, there is a widespread belief among many mmorpg players that "engaging with an MMO in-depth must mean focusing on a single character, doing some sort of max-level grind, and expecting a steady stream of more of the same so that your single character's progression rarely comes to a halt."

My anecdotal experience is somewhat at variance with that reading. It probably goes without saying to any long-time readers of this blog that getting a single character endgame-ready never formed much of a part of my plans. I've played a lot of mmorpgs over the last near-quarter century but in very few of them have I even reached the level cap, let alone stayed there long enough to gear up.

Back when I was more sociable than I am now, though, I was often a fairly active member of a guild. Over the course of five or six years, I was in half a dozen or more small to medium size guilds on different servers in EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot and EverQuest II, as well as a couple of fairly large ones, in which I was less obviously active.

Only in the large guilds did I see a significant number of players focusing their efforts on endgame activities. In the rest, even when there were forty or fifty members playing fairly frequently, most of them were leveling and not just the one character, either. 

Plenty of people never even got a single character to the cap before they drifted away and disappeared for good, sometimes with a goodbye, more often not. Not infrequently, people would play several characters to the mid-levels before settling on one to "work on". 

With the the leveling pace so much slower back then, even people who played most evenings and every weekend took months to get anywhere close to the cap, a target that was in any case always moving, thanks to the annual or even semi-annual expansion cadence that was the norm at the time. 

One of the reasons so many people kept rolling alts was the differential in advancement between low, mid and high level characters. When you found yourself looking at ten, fifteen even twenty hours to earn a single level, the lure of a level you could knock out in an hour or two, as things went back at the beginning of the game, could be too much to resist.

Then there was the appeal of variety. As I mentioned earlier, mmorpgs used to come with multiple starting areas and a wide choice of low and mid-level zones. In some games it was quite possible to level several characters to the higher end of the game without duplicating any content at all. Even when you did retread the same ground, the differences between classes and even races was much more significant than it was later to become.

It's no great exageration to say that playing different classes or races could feel like playing a different game altogether. In Vanguard, for example, there were three very different continents, each of which was probably as large as the full landmass of a latterday mmorpg. Raising a character in the deserts of Qalia felt existentially different to raising one in the forests of Thestra or the jungles of Kojan and even playing a different race on the same continent could make you feel as lost as if you'd never been there before.

Many mmorpgs were like that, then. As Shintar says about SW:tOR, for many players, playing multiple characters wasn't "some kind of side activity that you engage in when you've hit a bit of a lull with the "main" game - it is the game!" Not for everyone, of course; possibly not even for the majority, but for a very substantial minority, those people who either never aspired to reach the endgame or realised it was going to elude them if they tried.

In all the games I've mentioned and plenty more, I have multiple characters, usually a handful, occasionally a dozen or more. In one or two the count passes a score. In newer mmorpgs, ones I've started in the last decade or so, those figures fall away alarmingly. I'm not sure I've played a stable of characters in a single game since GW2 launched in 2012.

I hadn't really thought about that until I read Shintar's post this morning. My first reaction was to blame ennui or over-familiarity. I've been playing these games a long time, now. The appeal of starting over and over again must have palled.

Thinking about it for a little longer, I realized that's not really the case. Yes, there is a little of the "been there, done that" mentality creeping in around the edges these days but it must be evident in the enthusiasm with which I regularly write about new mmorogs I've played that I'm far from done with the genre yet.

A more likely explanation might be the way mmorpg design has changed over the years. For sound commercial reasons, few games these days launch with multiple starting areas or leveling paths. Developers like to keep players together as much as possible to enhance the impression that a lot of people play their game and anyway, leveling itself is out of fashion; it's all about the endgame and how fast you can get there.

Even so, only the most linear design supporting the most meager content lets you see everything on one trip through the levels. In most modern mmorpgs there still some juice to be squeezed from playing different classes or races or from making different choices at various decision points. And yet these days I rarely bother.

The real reason, I believe, lies not with my level of interest nor with game designers' methods but in a change of payment models. It's no co-incidence that I seem to have begun to find rolling multiple characters in the same game less appealing at around the same time the Free to Play revolution kicked in.

The choice used to be between carrying on playing the same character or rolling another in the same game and starting over. Games cost money then and mmorpgs also required a subscription. Re-rolling made sound economic sense, a way of both extracting extra value from an existing purchase and feeling like you were getting something new at the same time.

Once developers began to give their games away for nothing and stopped charging a monthly fee to play them it began to be both practical and attractive not just to start over in the same game but to start over in a new game altogether. That whole "three-monther" thing, which eventually slimmed down into a single month, when players would game-hop almost continually, ostensibly searching for the next forever game, might perhaps be more realistically interpreted as a more intense, more exciting way to re-roll. Instead of rolling a new character we began rolling a new game.

Well, I did. I still do. Having the blog allows me to paint my serial re-rolling as research rather than
self-indulgence but I very much doubt I'd be behaving any differently if I didn't have a blog to post my experiences and opinions of every new tutorial and starting zone. If you're the kind of player who rarely settles down to play a single character in a single game anyway, the kind who always wanted to see all the starting zones and play all the classes and races, it's quite unlikely you'll be able to resist the lure of so many new experiences that cost you nothing at all.

Nothing, of course, other than any final sense of accomplishment, except perhaps for the broadening of your understanding of the hobby itself. After ten years of game-hopping, I feel I know a lot about mmorpgs as a genre but not all that much about any one of them in particular.

Which is fine. It's pretty much how I felt about all those games where I played a lot of characters. I always felt I knew a good deal more about EQ or Vanguard as whole than many of the people I played with, even though I would freely acknowledge many of them knew a good deal more than I did about specific aspects. 

Playing a lot of characters gives you a good overview. It gives you perspective. Playing one character exclusively gives you depth of experience and thorough understanding of the detail. The really dedicated players end up acquiring both but most of us have to settle for one or the other.

I've always preferred to contextualize. I like to feel I have some perspective. If that means missing out on the fine detail, I can accept that. For now, that perspective and context applies mostly to the genre rather than to any specific game. The time will come, I hope and trust, when the pendulum will swing again and I'll find myself re-rolling and starting over in the same game just to see more of what I'm already playing.