How Hard Is Too Hard?

I really don't have anything much to talk about today, or nothing most people reading are likely to be interested in, anyway. More like actively annoyed by, I would guess. I left a comment on one of Tipa's posts the other day, to the effect that I'd rather write about AI than gaming most days and I'll add now that I'd rather write about music than either.

When I do write about games here, which I think is still easily the majority of the time, it tends not to be about MMORPGs. Belghast has a thought piece up today that goes some way towards explaining why that might be. 

The idea that MMO developers pay too much attention to the hardcore is far from new, of course. I remember discussions and arguments about it often on blogs like Spouse Aggro and Hardcore Casual, well before I had a blog of my own and I've been blogging since 2011. 

Has it gotten worse, I wonder? I'm not sure. It's easy to forget the pattern of these things.

There was a long period, measured in years, when there seemed to be more complaints within the blogosphere about MMORPGs getting easier than the other way around. The hardcore perspective back then seemed to be that they were fighting a mostly-losing battle against the dumbing-down of the genre, with filthy casuals swarming over the battlements to parade up and down the castle walls, showing off their vanity pets and fancy mounts, rather than learning their rotations and parsing their DPS like real players should.

All of that got muddled up with the Free-to-Play revolution, too, the theory being that if you let anyone in without proving they owned a credit card and were willing to use it, the whole thing would fall apart. Of course, at the same time, the exact same people were complaining bitterly that the F2P hordes were all-too-willing to whip out their credit cards to buy power and advantage in the cash shop...

None of it made much sense then and it makes even less with the benefit of hindsight. But of course, we all see things through our own lens or from the inside of our own silos. Assuming you can see anything out of a silo, that is, which would, were it true, break the metaphor.

Scopique points out in the comment thread to Belghast's post that "there’s the potential that such not-so-hardcore MMOs exist, but they aren’t on your radar for one reason or another". This is a very valid observation, one made all too rarely in my opinion, as we all tend to write as though our experience is somehow universal, something of which I'm as guilty as anyone.

Kay of Kay Talks Games, another blog I believe I picked up in last year's Blaugust (Or possibly an earlier one...) and still read with enjoyment, even though I rarely find cause to mention it here, wrote a very good piece about the problem a while ago. I've been meaning to say something about it ever since but haven't found the opportunity until today

The post is called Gaming Bubbles, which is self-explanatory and I found it particularly interesting since it comes from someone who knows of the genre but generally doesn't play many MMORPGs. I found it particularly telling that she says, of Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online, "Those games have accumulated 26 million and 23 million players, respectively, yet I never really hear about them online unless it’s someone bringing up how disastrous the Fallout 76 launch was."

It's all too easy to assume everyone else is talking abut the same issues we focus on but it's long been my impression that, in what we loosely and not entirely accurately call "the West", very few self-identifying gamers would be able to name more than a handful of MMORPGs, let alone claim to have played any of them. (And if they had, it would inevitably be World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV.)

If you cast the net outside the self-proclaimed "gaming community", I'd bet the question would be met with a blank stare. Both the movie and the infamous South Park episode were so long ago now, I doubt many non-gamers remember WoW exists.

In that context, whether the developers' assumed focus on the hardcore part of the audience is misguided or merely an act of increasingly desperate self-preservation becomes much harder to judge. It's very tempting to think that, were the barriers to entry lowered and the obsession with endgame abandoned, currently uninterested casual gamers would come flocking in but I suspect the result might be somewhat less heart-warming. Or commercially desirable.

There might be little or no increase in interest from the casuals but some of the disgruntled hardcore might leave. Probably for one of the gazillion games that likes to describe itself as "Souls-like". The success of Dark Souls certainly added some fuel to the hardcore argument that everyone wants challenging content as well as giving those who actually do somewhere to go to find it.

One MMORPG company that gets - often grudging - approval these days for being able to hold and serve an audience is Daybreak, particularly in relation to EverQuest, which is still objectively successful, albeit on a small scale, after more than a quarter of a century. It's also frequently cited as a benchmark for difficulty in the genre, even if it isn't anything like as difficult as it once was. 

I don't play much EQ these days but I do play EverQuest II and there you can see the devs trying to balance on a slack rope over a ravine as they attempt to appease the voluble and volatile hardcore, the people who presumably pay most of their bills, while trying to ameliorate the situation for the softer-core crafters, decorators and general casuals, who pay the rest. With the game almost certainly teetering on a financial knife-edge, they really can't afford to piss off any significant demographic to the point where money stops changing hands.

To a greater or lesser extent, I imagine many MMO companies are in similar situations. That explains some of the decision-making, although I also think that game devs en masse are almost bound to be more hardcore than the overwhelming majority of their potential customers. It would be hard for them not to be, really. Wilhelm makes that point in some detail in Bel's comment thread.

And, as has been demonstrated countless times, developers think the broad mass of players in their games are going to find content easier than they do. Also proved by experience is the way the cutting edge of the playerbase will always either find new content too easy or work out some way to trivialize it the developers never imagined.

As Muspel says in the same thread, multiple difficulty settings are always an option. EQII has done a great job of that by literally making every new dungeon come in several flavors, with the same content available for solo and two grades of group, if not raids too. 

That's a welcome approach that I certainly appreciate but it does tend to push players even deeper into their own, ever smaller silos. While it's true that every motorist is also a pedestrian, it's not always true that every raider is a soloist, so not everyone is going to appreciate the effort that's been made to satisfy all tastes.

I don't have a solution for any of this. I don't think anyone does. If they did, they'd presumably be running the biggest, most popular MMORPG out there right now. 

And maybe they are, at that. Looping back to the idea that we don't really look far outside our own comfort zones, I'm occasionally reminded that almost no-one I read ever blogs about some of the biggest MMOs, like Old School Runescape or whichever version of Lineage is in favor these days. For all I know, someone in one of those may be thinking of all of this as a solved problem already.

I kind of doubt it, though. I suspect it falls under the rubric “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”. Abraham Lincoln used to get the credit for saying that, which would mean the problem has been around for quite a while, but these days it seems to be accepted that it was first said by John Lydgate, who died in 1451, so we've known about it for a lot longer.

And I fear we're probably stuck with it.