This Is Your Situation

Jack Emmert, CEO of Cryptic and one of the names behind a whole slew of MMORPGs you'll have heard of, if not played, including all his current studio's titles and also City of Heroes and DCUO, gave an interview to GamesIndustry recently that seemed to me to be at one and the same time both clear- and short-sighted. His thesis is that there's a pent-up demand for MMOs that's currently going unmet and his primary evidence for it is the number of people who bought New World, apparently estimated to be a staggering 10 million.

First, ten million? Really? The source quoted by GI is Video Game Insights, whose website comes under the umbrella of something called SensorTower. It seems to offer a service very similar to what SuperData used to trade on so give it whatever credibility you used to give them, I guess?

Ten million sounds like a lot of customers to give up on, though. Impressive chutzpah from Amazon, throwing that many under the bus. Jack's explanation for that is "I don't believe that the infrastructure and the strategy was there to sustain it" although if Amazon don't have the infrastructure, who does? Still, even if it was actually "only" half of what VGI claim, jack's right. That's a lot of players willing to give an MMO a go.

But not to stick with one, obviously. Just like the millions who didn't stick with Lost Ark or any of the other big ticket launches of the last few years.

Jack also cites the continuing millions believed, if not proven, to be playing World of Warcraft and "the Daybreak games, or whatever" as proof the interest is still there. All of which is uncontroversial enough, I guess, although I'm not entirely convinced it means a huge pent-up demand so much as a lot of people stuck in games they used to love, now finding themselves unwilling to move on...

I'm more interested in his analysis of why the demand, if we accept it exists, isn't being met. Apparently it's because the new games are simultaneously empty of meaning even while being overfilled with content.:

 "These new MMOs or MMO-adjacent games become so watered down by the expectations that it's got to be everything. And so you see games that are basically features, but without any soul... And so they fail, and you've seen it over and over again."

I think he's talking about what Wilhelm often complains about with games in development - that desire to be everything to everyone rather than sticking to what you're good at. "Feature creep" as it's sometimes called. Jack goes on to explain that when he was designing Neverwinter Online, he had a simple mission statement: "Kill shit and take their loot."

He doubles down: "That was it, over and over again.". Then he adds, almost as an after thought, "And make it fun." The fact that NWO is still running is cited as proof the concept worked. 

A lot of MMOs are still running, though. As has been noted many times, they're harder to kill than cockroaches. I could log into half a dozen I can think of immediately that have been up as long or longer than NWO and I'd lay good odds I'd be one of fewer than a dozen players online in any of them. Persistence is evidence of something but I'm not sure that something is demand.

My real problem with Jack's thesis, though, isn't the existence of a substantial demographic interested in massively multiple online games. Undeniably, there are tens, maybe hundreds of millions of people playing MMOs of various kinds. 

If we assume Jack means the kinds of games he makes and that he's name-checking, though, all of which are MMORPGs, not just MMOs, I'll still allow it. Lots of people do play those, albeit nowhere near as many. And logic does suggest there are orders of magnitude more players, who used to play games like those but don't any more.

Where I diverge from his argument is that what the people, who currently aren't playing MMORPGs but might one day, are impatiently awaiting are games where they can

 "run the same goddamn dungeon a hundred times" 

so they can get better and better loot, progress their character and improve their playing skills, which is what Jack thinks is needed to bring those lost sheep thundering back into the fold.

"It's not that I need a gajillion number of dungeons. What I need is to make sure the progression is worth it. In fact, I enjoy doing things a gajillion number of times, because each time I get a little bit better, and then all of a sudden I'm an expert and I'm telling other people what to do."

I'm happy for Jack. He's like Mark E Smith from the Fall. Well, in one way. They both dig repetition. 

I do, too - in music. In games, not so much. I'm over here, in the camp Jack dismisses as irrelevant:

"But other people will say, 'Well, that's impossible, people get bored or whatever'.

Oh, god yes. Try to make me do that and I will get bored. And leave. But appraently

"That misunderstands the point."

Sorry? What point was that, again? It was the lack of any need for variety or content in a new MMORPG.

"The launch does not need to be everything with an MMO. It does not need to be 200 hours of unique content. It just flat out doesn't. Running the same dungeon multiple times is perfectly fine at the start, then three months later there's something new, and three months later there's something new… And once you do that, the players are sold."

Except that the evidence of numerous Steam Charts past is that by the time you get to that first, quarterly content drop, 90% of your players will have left. And few of them are going to come back to see what else is new three months later because by then your game is going to be just some old game they wish they hadn't wasted their money on. The demand may be there but the patience sure as hell is not. 

You may be able to frog-boil WoW vets into running the same content over and over and over at higher and higher difficulty forever and ever but that's a form of conditioning that takes years to induce. It's not going to bed down in a couple of weeks, which is, at the outside, about as long as you'll have before the players get bored and wander off to find  something less tedious.

The two genres that have been eating MMORPGs lunch for half a decade now are Survival-Crafting and Open World RPG Gacha. One of those does indeed exemplify Jack's wish to "focus on economical use of assets and environments" and reliance on repetition, although the repetition in question is rarely if ever multiple dungeon runs. The repetition has more to do with creativity than compliance.

As for the other, it's the total antithesis. Pure entertainment. Also a six-weekly content cadence that leaves players struggling to keep up rather than lost for new things to do. 

What neither of them rely on is running the same goddam dungeon over and over and over until your eyes bleed, just so you can add 0.1% to your Critical Chance stat, if you're lucky. There are people who like doing that, true, but I suspect very, very few of them are actively looking for a new game that will allow them to do it. They're being very well-served already in a number of games that were last truly popular at least a decade and a half ago and most of them are not going to be moving unless that game actually shuts down.

None of which is to say Jack doesn't have a good business plan. He has. It's very realistic. A lot of developers would do well to follow it.

"I'm a niche developer in the grand scheme of things, because I identify... something with a passionate fan base, and then I try my best to create an authentic experience."

There's the future of the genre in a nutshell for you: niche product serving a pre-existing fanbase. I'm not going to argue against it. It'll work and if someone cares to apply the method to an IP I care about, I'll play it, too.

I'm just not sold on the idea that there's some larger, untapped, unsatisfied audience out there, desperately waiting for someone to make an MMORPG that will let them run the same dungeon over and over and over... 

Or maybe I just hope there isn't. God! that would be depressing...

There And Back Again

Yesterday, when I was making some largely incoherent observations on leveling speed in GW2, Tobold was examining the topic rather more clinically in the context of the upcoming release of WildStar. The gist of his argument is one with which I sympathize, namely that if  company wants me to play their MMORPG for a period measured in years rather than months they might want to consider the pacing.

Unfortunately for Tobold, and me, and anyone else who hankers after the slower pace of our MMO salad days, the likelihood of any major game developer deciding to release a triple-A MMORPG in which the majority of the appeal relies on a two thousand hour journey from creation to cap appears remote. The developer meta for these things tends to thrash around in attempt to hit all the targets but for some while now the prevailing wind has blown towards accessibility. It's all about facilitating social play rather than giving players a giant mountain to climb and letting them get on with it.

The current orthodoxy holds that commercial success in the field rests firmly on supporting (or exploiting) the bonds players form between themselves. With that comes an overriding desire to ensure that players who come to a new MMO must at all costs be able to find, meet and play with their friends. There's also an assumption, which goes virtually unquestioned, that all players whether or not they come pre-equipped with a set of gaming buddies will, as a first priority, require a Guild or a Clan.

When new cultural forms arise incrementally and haphazardly, as appears to have been the case with online roleplaying games, sifting cause from effect can be tricky. I do wonder whether the pre-eminence of Guilds as the social structure for MMORPGs might not have more to do with the very difficulty and inaccessibility of the content in those early games than with any innate desire among the players for meaningful social contact. The difficulty of soloing in Everquest has often, in my opinion, been exaggerated, but it's beyond question that those who wanted to progress faster, more efficiently or further certainly benefited enormously from having a network of like-minded players for mutual support.

I do sometimes wonder what the hobby would be like now had it come into existence back at the stub end of the 20th century with the concepts and attitudes that underpin Guild Wars 2 in place rather than those that derived from MUDs. How would things have played out if back then gameplay in the very first MMOs had been designed scrupulously to avoid almost every aspect of competition? If every resource, from crafting nodes to experience and loot gained from killing mobs or completing quests, was not just shared around but handed out equally to anyone participating, regardless of the extent of their contribution?

What if, in addition to these communitarian principles, completing the actual content itself had been as simple and manageable as it is today? If a new player coming to a new MMO could expect to progress pleasantly, productively, efficiently alone, all the way to the level cap? Had things been that way from the beginning, had the infrastructure of the games themselves automatically provided everything a player needed to succeed, would players still have chosen to form numerous, discrete, collective organizations just to have an identity larger than the individual?

Perhaps ironically, the all-pervasive online social networks that have changed the culture far more broadly and profoundly than anything within gaming could ever have done scarcely existed when the early MMOs had their brief ascendancy. Even WoW's breakout success pre-dates the adoption of Facebook and Twitter as mainstream global communication media. The extent to which awareness of that always-on connectedness now informs the design decisions underlying all forms of entertainment would be hard to overstate. Had we not, in those more benign and kindly worlds that might have been, needed to create Guilds so we could huddle together for mutual protection, perhaps in the end we'd simply have imported our Facebook groups and Twitter followers instead, with much the same effect.

Somehow I doubt it. Gamers, especially those coming from the RPG end of the spectrum, seem surprisingly resistant to drinking the social networking Kool-Aid. I have my suspicions that in an alternative history of MMORPGs that began with the emphasis on inclusion rather than competition we'd now be looking at something very much like the culture of playing alone together we've been moving towards this last half-decade but without even the nominal nod to socialization that Guilds provide.

All of which brings me to Shards, the as-yet barely-existent glimpse of what might one day become a new twist on the MMORPG rope. It's brought to you by Citadel Studios (aka The Company Formerly Known As Mythic). The "teaser video" is largely useless but this Massively piece is more informative.

The idea of what we might call Minimally Multiple Online Roleplaying Games is an intriguing one. These player-run servers, catering for dozens rather than thousands of players, might be a route back to the good old golden age days of 2000 hour leveling paths and reputation that counts for something for the few hundred people who still miss all that. It would also, neatly for my thesis, preclude the necessity for Guilds, given that the population cap for the entire server would scarcely meet the requirements of a modern-day "small family guild".

John Smedley recently raised a similar possibility for H1Z1, SOE's soon-come entry into the ever more crowded zombie survival market and while no-one knows what Landmark will grow up to be, one theory is that it could become a "make your own MMO" machine. It's all just one more step along the path to niche, a path we now seem to be traveling down at such speed that last year's Big New Idea, crowd-funded MMOs aimed at special interest groups numbering in the tens of thousands, is already beginning to look old-fashioned and unwieldy.

I have to wonder, if we keep on heading in this direction, will we eventually find we've re-invented the single-player RPG? And if the StoryBricks AI is as good as they say it is, would we even notice? Then again, perhaps that's all some of us ever wanted anyway...