I Wouldn't Start From Here...

Coming back to New World after a long layoff, it's obvious a lot has changed but perhaps the one thing that stands out beyond all else is how much "easier" the game is now. It's not just parts of the game, either; it's all of it.

I'll leave it to someone who knows the mechanics far better than I do, maybe Belghast or Heartlessgamer, to go into the details. I've been dipping in and out of Aeternum for so long now, I find it hard to remember just what was added when. All I can say for certain is that the whole game feels like someone's oiled the bearings. It's a much smother ride than it used to be.

The point of this post isn't to examine in depth exactly how New World has changed. It's more to ask the question why did it need to change at all?

The obvious answer is the loss of more than 90% of its players over the course of the first year. That's the kind of precipitous decline that necessitates some kind of drastic action. Mmorpgs that fall as fast tend to throw a couple of Hail Mary passes, converting to Free To Play being the favorite, before either settling in for a long, slow retrenchement to a tiny, insecure niche or giving up and closing down.

New World, of course, has the benefit of a megacorp standing behind it. Like EverQuest II in the days of Sony Online Entertainment or Final Fantasy XIV before A Realm Reborn, funds can be diverted from elsewhere to ensure a flagship product doesn't tarnish the brand by its abject failure.

That's not the part that interests me. What I found myself wondering, as I pounded across the glorious, floral countryside of Edengrove this morning, was why mmorpg developers constantly and consistently overstimate their target audience's tolerance for nuisance, inconvenience and annoyance.

As devotees of the genre, we hear an awful lot about what's supposedly wrong with mmorpgs. For years the narrative has revolved around how everything's been made too slick, too simple, too damn easy. I couldn't begin to guess how many blog posts or comments I've read extolling the virtues of slow travel  or bemoaning the prevalence of quest trackers or map markers. I may even have penned a few myself.

The mantra for many a commentator has been the same "The journey not the destination". We've talked up the early days of the genre as a Golden Age, when players had time to sit around the campfire, getting to know each other, when reputations mattered and actions had consequences. Kickstarter and the less-celebrated funding platforms have echoed to the sound of promises to bring back the good old days, when everything took longer but mattered more.

Did it, though? 

Well, yes, for some it undoubtedly did. There was the whole "not knowing any better" thing going on, to be sure, and the novelty angle as well, but I wouldn't attempt to pretend there isn't a true demographic that genuinely does prefer to walk uphill in the snow both ways. There may even be enough people willing to pay for the penalties to make it commercially viable to cater for them, although that's yet to be proven.

What's less in doubt is that the history of just about every mmorpg you can name contains an observable, measurable drift from harder to easier or  - more accurately - from awkward to convenient. Every game I've ever played eventually sands off the sharp corners and raises the speed limits. Often the changes go under the rubric of "Quality of Life" but the quality in question is a saving in both time and effort.

If every mmorpg eventually ends up with faster, cheaper, more frequent, more widely available travel options, to take a specific example, what I'd like to know is why don't they all start with them? Is it Blizzard's argument (Mainly with itself.) over the addition of flying mounts to the game, one of the rare examples of a developer deciding the needle has swung too far towards "Easy" and needs to be pulled back.

The logic, presumably, is that if you let players zip around the map at will from the get-go, they'll skip all your lovingly hand-crafted content, get bored sooner and quit early. It sounds convincing until you remember that most mmorpgs of recent (And not-so-recent.) times have hemorrhaged players in a matter of weeks after launch. It seems a bit precious to be worrying that players will rip through your content too quickly, when the real problem is persuading them to stick around long enough to see much of it at all.

New World started out with very few fast travel options. Those it had were relatively inconvenient, rather expensive, gated by lengthy cooldowns; sometimes all three at once. In addition to having minimal instant travel, the game had no mounts. It didn't even have sprint. 

For players like me, those were plus factors. I like to level slowly and see all the sights. If the sights are worth seeing, criss-crossing the map on foot just gives me more opportunity to take great screenshots. New World worked very well for me on that level.

Since I was running everywhere anyway, I didn't really mind the separate local storage and trading posts, either. Not being much of a fan of story in mmorpgs, the lack of a coherent narrative didn't bother me and neither did the absence of obvious quest hubs. Slowish levelling and even slower gathering and crafting just meant the parts of the game I most enjoyed would be there for me to enjoy for longer.

New World, as it was when it launched, suited me quite well but, as has been pointed out to me many times, I am not the typical mmorpg player. Often, the things I like just piss most players off. If I was designing a new game with the intention of appealing to a large audience, my own personal taste would be just about the last point of reference I'd use.

As far as I can tell, no matter how much players may say they like to do all the work themselves, what the majority really want is for the game to do it for them. They like on-screen quest trackers that guide them right to their objectives, which can be clearly seen on mini-maps. They like questgivers to be placed in high-traffic areas, grouped conveniently so all the quests for an area can be scooped up at once and finished as fast and efficiently as possible. They like busy auction houses where they can buy anything they don't have time to get for themselves.

For Western audiences, auto-pathing may be a step too far but pretty much anything short of having the game literally play itself is likely to be welcomed. If there's any doubt, just look at the kind of Add-Ons that gain traction in games that allow or encourage them.

All of which makes me wonder why developers almost always seem to wait until shoals of players have left for more clement waters before retooling their games to play more comfortably. If QoL changes are so universally popular and demanded, why not bake them into the core design and have them in place at launch?

Had New World launched a year ago in the exact state it's in now, would it have been more successful? Would those concurrencies, once pushing a million, have remained in the hundreds of thousands? Would Amazon have had the big hit they were looking for, not just for a month or two but for years to come?

I have no idea. Until a major Western developer launches a triple-A mmorpg with all the conveniences ready and waiting for the first players, streamers and reviewers to experience on Day One, there's no point of comparison. Maybe that would drive players away even faster, who knows?

Not me, but I'd love to find out. Maybe New World's fresh start servers, when they finally arrive, will serve as a straw in the wind. More likely, though, the moment has passed and the best Amazon can hope for is a slow and steady recovery to mid-range respectability. 

Whatever happens, will other developers learn from New World's example? I very much doubt it. No-one ever really does learn from anyone elses' experience, do they? It's about as much as you can expect that they'll learn from their own. At least Amazon seem to have managed that.