AQ3D Has A New Introduction. I Thought I'd Play It. So I did. Except I Didn't.

Artix Entertainment, developer of AdventureQuest 3D, sent me an interesting email at the weekend, with a shortened version of this news item on the website. The game will be ten years old in October and in common with almost all ageing MMORPGs it's finding recruitment difficult. 

Unlike some developers, finding themselves in a similar predicament, however, Artix is perfectly happy to explain the problem in painfully honest terms. Plenty of devs for other games have given interviews over the years complaining how hard it is to get anyone even to complete a tutorial, much less carry on for a while to find out what their game is really about but few have gone on to lay out just what that failure to engage with new customers means for the future of the game as a whole.

"Low completion rates directly affect AQ3D’s ability to promote the game, grow the team, and fund updates."

I mean, it is obvious but how often does anyone come right out and say it? The full news item goes into much more detail, complete with percentages. It's an informative read.

As usual, the problem is deemed to be the Intro. It's always either the Intro or the Tutorial, often but not always one and the same thing, that gets the blame. 

Some games never stop tinkering with the way the game attempts to introduce itself to new players. Wilhelm has written about EVE doing just that and CCP is certainly one of the companies more willing to talk about the problem. Other games, like Guild Wars 2, have quite possibly never changed the introduction since the game was launched. If they changed it in the ten years I was playing, I can't remember it happening.

Most developers probably take a couple of swings and then give it up as a lost cause, which is almost certainly the sensible choice. I suspect the truly honest explanation for the problem, the one few devs will ever admit to, is that new players just don't want to start playing old games. 

It seems as if gamers love to go on playing old games they already play, to the point that getting people to try anything new at all is becoming something of a problem for the MMO genre, if not the gaming industry. They can be cajoled to go back and play games they used to play, too, and a really hot new title can bring gamers on board by the millions. 

Getting people to start playing a game that came out years ago and then keep playing it, though? Yeah, that's not going to happen. Not very often.

Still, you have to try, don't you? Or so some devs believe and Artix would appear to be one of them. Complaining voices on the Steam Discussion pages suggest, this is at least the fourth time they've remade the Intro, possibly the fifth or sixth. I'm hardly a regular player but even I can remember playing through three very different previous versions, all of which are probably reviewed somewhere on this blog, so I can confirm this has to be #4 at the lowest count.

I was curious to see what they'd changed so I played through the whole thing last night and this morning.

Or I thought I did...

I couldn't see any links to the new Intro in either the email or on the website, so I logged into Steam, opened the game and made a new character. Then I played through the Intro and Tutorial I got, which was certainly new to me. It took me just over eighty minutes, last night and this morning. When I'd finished, I came here and wrote the following post. 

I'll tell you now: this is not a review of the New Intro. 

 

The first thing I'd say about is that it's long. According to Steam it took me over 80 minutes. It didn't feel quite that long because it's all action. The email says 

"This intro focuses on less friction, more action, fewer systems at once, and a smoother onboarding experience"

It also explains the new version is

 "Designed for New Players (Not Veterans)" 

 because 

 "Longtime players may find things obvious, but new players often feel overwhelmed or confused" 

My feeling is that players new only to AQ3D, not the MMORPG genre itself, will find it about as confusing as they do any new game of its kind, no more and no less, while players new to the genre itself will be mostly baffled. I must have played through literally hundreds of similar introductions and tutorials and I found myself puzzling over what to do or where to go next at least half a dozen times.

It must be close to impossible to remove all sources of confusion from something like this. The new Intro makes an attempt to guide the player through every interaction, using on-screen pointers and arrows but I had a few minor issues where the way the arrows seemed to be leading was through a solid wall or when there didn't seem to be an obvious indication of which button to press next. 

There were also numerous messages concerning non-tutorial systems like Daily Tasks that wouldn't have made a lot of sense to a real new player and I spotted several spelling errors in the text but as the email is keen to make clear

"This intro is a fast-built concept, not a fully polished final product."

The idea is that current players will run through the new introduction and tutorial and give feedback by way of an in-game survey. I finished the whole thing but no survey popped. Maybe it's not ready yet.

There certainly needs to be some kind of formal finish to the whole thing because at the moment by far the most confusing aspect is the very end. After more than an hour of close guidance and tight hand-holding, the Introduction ends with a portal that dumps the player onto the flagstones of the game's hub city, Battleon, at which point all assistance just... stops.

I looked around for a continuation of the quest I'd been on, someone who might explain what just happened, but there was no-one. Just the regular NPCs and questgivers who always hang around, touting for custom. I checked my quest journal and there was nothing there either. Since no survey appeared, I logged out and came to write this post instead.

While there certainly needs to be a smoother transition into the game itself, I guess it's fair to assume that any new player who's made it through more than an hour of instruction and adventure to get this far is more likely then not to go and have a look around, take some of the available quests and even start playing the game in the regular fashion. 

To that extent it would already have overcome one of the biggest problems with the previous Intro, which was that

"...most newbies dropped off before reaching Battleon."

On the other hand, the gameplay of AQ3D itself is very different from the gameplay of the new Introduction. The Intro is a tightly scripted, linear adventure with lots of action and some quite striking set piece events. The game that follows is a very typical, old-school MMORPG, in which the player is expected to concentrate on gear, levels and any number of progression systems.

It's also much slower. To play through the new Intro I had to make a fresh character. By the end of it, that character was two levels higher than my regular character. When she fell out of the portal into Battleon she was already level 14. 

I get that the idea is to make the game seem exciting. Something is happening all the time in the Intro. There are pop-ups and flashes and messages telling you about your stats and how you're getting more and more powerful. You get a full set of gear, a weapon and a horse.

There's also a solid, if extremely unoriginal story. Seriously, how many games have a "Void" that's threatening to annihilate existence? Sometimes it seems like all of them. But unoriginal though it may be, the story trucks along and holds the interest well enough.

The  problem with all of that is that it could easily set up unreasonable expectations in someone unfamiliar with the genre. An hour of non-stop excitement, action and dopamine hits and then everything goes into what feels, by contrast, like extreme slow motion.

There are only a handful of comments so far on the Steam discussion forum but all of them make much the same point: another new Introduction is a waste of resources because there's little or no chance new players will come into the game no matter how good it is. Instead, efforts should be focused on getting former players to come back.

And that is indeed how many of the more successful older MMORPGs have been handling things for years. After a certain point, the pool of ex-players vastly outnumbers any realistic expectations for potential newcomers and former players really should be a lot easier to reach with marketing and promotions. After all, presumably they liked the game once. Maybe all they need is a reminder of how much.

As for the new Introduction itself, I think it's definitely the best so far, although that isn't saying all that much. The first two were pretty bad. The one this replaces was a lot better but the latest one really zips along. I enjoyed playing it even if it did just seem to come to a sudden, unsatisfying halt just when it was getting interesting.

Will it make any difference to the onboarding issue? Not a chance. I'd be willing to bet the problem is rarely that new players can't understand what to do. It's that they can understand it all too well and don't want anything more to do with it.

Instead of trying to get new players interested in their decade-old game, maybe Artix out to be working on a new one. Failing that, they probably need some kind of Classic or Retro server option, some way to milk the nostalgia market and bring back some of the players who've drifted away.

That, of course, is easier said than done, as many other developers have discovered to their cost, but it probably makes more sense than spending scarce resources on yet another Intro and Tutorial."

 

All of which turns out to be moot because I was, in fact, playing the OLD Intro. Or, rather, the old-new Intro, one I'd never played before because they did indeed make yet another Intro between the real new one and the last one I did play, which I reviewed here five years ago. 

Since I can't figure out how to access the real new Intro without making a whole, new account and since I also don't want to spend any more time on it today, that's going to have to stand as a review of the old one, which is apparently still in play. Good to get that on record I guess, even if all the inferences and conclusions I drew are wrong.

As soon as I can get a hands-on with the real New Intro, I'll be able to make a true comparison and maybe come to some different conclusions.

For today, though, that's all I'm doing!