Talking Shop

Taking my own advice, for once, I'm going to chime in on a few topics I read in blog posts yesterday - always assuming I can remember what they were. I read them on my Kindle Fire just before I went to sleep, which really isn't the best preparation. 

One was definitely Redbeard at Parallel Context, who posted about the propensity for MMORPGs - and RPGs in general - to place the player in the role of Hero or Champion. Red makes an interesting comparison between professional sports and rpgs, saying 

"...what is frequently missed in the RPG/MMO power fantasy is what happens when your skills diminish over time. Or when you screw up and those adoring fans turn on you.... In an RPG/MMO, you know you're the hero, so even if there's a setback you know that in the end there's a redemption path for you."

This is undoubtedly true but I'm not sure I see an alternative, at least for an MMORPG. In a single-player or co-op RPG, with a beginning, a middle and an end, it's entirely possible to create a full rags-to-riches-to rags narrative arc or simply to follow a life to its conclusion, be that death, retirement or elevation to Godhood. In an MMORPG, which only ends when the money runs out, that's not really so much of an option.

I seem to remember it's been tried. I have a vague idea there have been MMORPGs proposed, where the player character ages and eventually dies, only to be succeeded by another character representing a child, heir or apprentice, who inherits some of the stats, status and chattels of their parent or mentor. I'm vague about it mostly because although I may well have read about such games, I've never played one. I'm not even sure any of them got made.

I've also never played a roguelike, a genre I understand to be quite popular and successful but which I've always thought sounded... kinda dumb. Even though learning by attrition isn't my thing, though, I can see the intellectual appeal, within a single-player format. In a persistent world shared with thousands of other players, though? 

Most people find it hard enough keeping track of their friends' and guild-mates alts. Imagine having to keep re-introducing your new Main: "Hi! I'm Arven the Green. I'm Bronwyn Rockshaper's daughter. Can you invite me to guild, please? You remember Bronwyn, right? Her father was Walking Tree. Nothing? Really? Look, I'm carrying Bronwyn's staff. She left it to me when she died. It's actually a branch from Walking Tree himself. What d'you mean, I look nothing like her? Okay, yes, she was a dwarf and I'm an elf. Walking Tree was a walking tree ffs! This is his fricken' arm I'm holding! I'm gonna hit you in the head with it in minute, too, if you don't add me to the guild!"

And that's just the role-players, who'd almost certainly be the only ones likely even to try. For everyone else it would just be another clunky progression mechanic to be finessed in the most advantageous way possible, almost certainly by following an online guide. I don't think it would get us much further ahead and I can see why no well-known, successful game has tried it. (Go on, tell me that's exactly how it works in Lineage II or Age of Conan or some other game I've heard of but never played....) 

That said, I do believe it's quite feasible to design an MMORPG in which the player characters don't get more and more powerful until kings and queens defer to them and demi-gods treat them as equals. I also think that it's possible to change the narrative as the game ages and have the player character's situation change with it, which brings me to another post, this time at TAGN.

Writing about the "Level Squish" applied by Blizzard to World of Warcraft a few years back, Wilhelm laid out his reasons why he didn't think it had gone well. Among other things, he described it as "convoluted" and "overly complex". Having spent some time trying to come to grips with the changes back when they were new, I'd say that was being polite.

A big part of the problem is that MMORPGs don't conveniently stand still, making many once-necessary innovations seem like awkward legacy mechanics  just a few years later. It happens a lot in one of the games I know best, EverQuest II, where numerous systems creak and groan under the weight of their accrued cruft until they're quietly shunted to the sidelines. 

Most of those systems worked just fine when they were introduced. Almost all were accepted. Some were even popular. For a while. Inevitably, though, after three or four more expansions, all with their own new mechanics and systems, the friction between all those moving parts causes bits to break off, leaving jagged edges that catch the unwary. 

I've long had a potential solution for this ongoing problem, something that once seemed radical but now doesn't appear quite so crazy as it did. What if every expansion was a standalone game? After all, isn't that almost where Blizzard looked to be going with Classic Era? Didn't a lot of people hope they'd extend the same courtesy to Wrath Classic? (We won't mention Burning Crusade. No-one wanted that.)

What if, instead of getting everyone to come back once a year and start the whole sequence over again, the way Daybreak has tried to make into a way of life, why not design each expansion as a separate entity from the start? If the goal is to get everyone into the same content together, having a complete reset each time, where all characters begin on a level footing, with a fresh economy, would surely make the whole thing more appealing both to returnees and to the highly competitive hardcore, who always enjoy racing each other to the top.

It would also make it very much easier to keep a whole series of Era servers running for those who'd found their sweet spot in a certain expansion. No need to spend time and effort revamping the code. Just use the same basic engine with modulated mechanics each time. No struggling to rebalance old content so it plays nicely with the new systems. There'd be no cross-expansion content at all. 

All you'd need for continuity would be player and guild names. Gear would be a full reset and everyone could be alloccated whatever level and stats seemed appropriate to handle the new entry-level content. 

As for incidentals like race, class and gender, those have no lasting value in modern MMORPGs, most of which offer ways to change all of them at will. In fact, I realise I may just have argued myself out of my own objection to adding roguelike mechanics to the genre. That's what happens when you start thinking about MMORPGs too logically; you soon realise nothing much ever made sense anyway, so you may as well do what you damn well please!

Finally in this blog bounce bonanza, we come to Shintar's post about whether Star Wars: The Old Republic is unusually "bottom heavy". As someone who used to be strongly biased in favor of low-level content in MMORPGs, I have to say Shintar makes a good case for SW:tOR. You can argue about whether tying so much of the game's fortunes to multiple, heavily-scripted, fully voice-acted narratives was commercially or creatively appropriate but it's difficult to deny that bolting eight fully-realised single-player RPGs onto the front end of an MMO does give a lot of bottom end.

It's not the only game to have tried something like that. Guild Wars 2 had the Personal Story with its many branches, although the variations there do all feed into a single narrative relatively quickly and ArenaNet never made much of an attempt to separate them out afterwards. In retrospect, though, that always felt more like an experiment that didn't pan out, whereas SW:tOR's class storylines have generally been regarded as one of the game's big wins.

More significant than the relative success of the implementations, I feel, is the similar age of those two games. They came out within about a year of each other, well over a decade ago. Back then, it was largely expected that ambitious MMORPGs would launch with multiple, fully-realised starting areas and distinctive, different levelling paths. 

Leveling was seen as more important back then. Level boosts and skips weren't common. I'm not sure, without doing more fact-checking than I want to commit to right now, which game was the first to add them or when, but I do know they were very controversial for quite a while. Most MMORPG developers still promoted leveling as a key part of the experience; GW2 was a real outlier with its promise never to add to the initial 80 levels but even as a would-be mould-breaker, ANet wasn't ready to do away with leveling altogether.

Partly that would have been because, in those days, allowing players to create and level multiple characters was seen as a clear route to account retention. The F2P model hadn't entirely taken over and there needed to be reasons to keep people playing and therefore paying.

The increasing success of F2P titles, which by and large didn't offer nearly as many discrete starting areas or levelling paths, along with the general contraction of the market for MMORPGs following the sequential failure of a number of high-profile launches, must have made it a lot more attractive for developers to streamline the whole process. 

I also have to wonder about the impact of the solid success and atypical continued post-launch growth of Final Fantasy XIV (ARR version, of course.). It's a game with a single, unavoidable, linear narrative; alts aren't just uneccessary but positively ill-advised. It does seem more than possible that its rise to a pre-eminent postion in the genre may have contributed to the impression that an MMORPG doesn't need more than - at  most - a handful of starting areas and leveling paths to feel complete. 

Shintar's observations on SW:tOR cast both light and doubt on those assumptions. While it's true that the biggest games in the genre currently rely heavily on endgame and do all they can to step players over legacy leveling content to get them there, personal experience and anecdotal evidence suggest plenty of players prefer to potter around in the low-mid levels, making alt after alt, just hanging out in content they know and enjoy.

I don't play SW:tOR. I did, briefly and I may again but right now I don't and I can't claim to know much about it. Similarly, I've only dabbled in Lord of the Rings Online and Elder Scrolls Online, two othere games about which I regularly read bloggers' accounts of starting alts and replaying old content. 

I do play a lot of EverQuest II, though, and I have in the past played a lot of GW2 and EverQuest. All these games have a couple of things in common: they've been running for many years and they all have plenty of options for making new characters, who then aren't all forced to repeat the exact same leveling process as the rest.

I wonder how significant that is for longevity and player loyalty? And how more recent games that eschew such variety will fare in the longer run?