Shamus has written an article that summarizes others of his wherein he challenges the notion of challenge in a game.
It’s a good read, and prowling back through his archives on the subject is also enlightening. Specifically of note regarding our recent MMO discussion hereabouts is the idea that “challenge” is something that just doesn’t map well to MMO game design. The much broader user base of simultaneous players means that “challenge” is something that is often just left up to the players.
That’s one good argument for building instanced dungeons that scale to the approaching party, or even conform to requested parameters. (Raid leader signs up for “Omega Murder” level Naxx or whatever, instead of “Carebear Cake” level.)
At any rate, I’m very busy, but wanted to keep the discussion going, and Shamus’ article is another piece of the puzzle.
I commented on his site, but I’ll leave a little something here as well 😉
The problem exists when parties want their version of the game and nothing else. Why can’t we have both? Why can’t we select difficulties?
We kind of can in WoW and with the achievement promoting increased difficulty in encounters (Sartharion with 3 drakes, 8 man or 20 man Naxx) we sort of have this. The encounters even give you better loot if you do!
But right there is the problem. It’s all about loot. The people who opt for an easier game will never have the loot that the people who play the harder game have. Normal instances don’t give epics like heroics. Normal Sartharion only drops X number of pieces of loot, but drops a mount + X + n number of loots if you kill him with 3 drakes up.
Harder difficulties that give more loot will invariably draw the argument that everyone should be able to do them, not just those who choose to do it at that difficulty. But why should people be rewarded for not being able to execute an encounter in a specific manner?
Either way, everyone wants the same stuff in the end. Everyone wants the shiny purple items. Without the incentive, no one would do it on hard except those who wished to say they did it and for no other reason. I don’t think there are enough of those people around to focus game design around though 😉
So we’re left with a catch 22.
Or just a game design based on loot. 😉 Change that motivator, and you can do a lot of different things.
Well yea, that’s the best option, but Ysh doesn’t think we can do that! 😛
Personally I’d love to see a game where the armor and weapons you had were purely crafted and the reasons for defeating raid bosses were other than collecting loot, like story progression or crafting material gathering. This would, of course, only work if your drive for your game laid in some kind of conquest or PVP objective, methinks. I mean … what’s the real point of an MMO nowadays anyway, story wise?
In WoW you’re trying to fight a war with X number of participant parties. In WAR … well that’s self explanatory. In Age of Conan, there’s not really a war, but the factions hate each other, as factions do.
Blah this warrants a topic all its own 😉
WoW, I hate Shamus!
OK, now let me be serious, but I am probably the guy that builds his self-esteem from videogames and therefore demands a challenge that is not that easy to overcome.
Of course not… I agree that MMOs have to cater to a wide variety of player abilities, and they all should have fun of course.
But you cannot achieve this with making the game easy.
1.) You take away from the game
2.) You stop players from growing with the challenge and thus
3.) They never experience the full potential of the game
Examples: Combat oriented players would totally love shrewd tactics to lure a mob in a bad position, attack him from behind and plan where to fight the mob in a good defensive position.
Making the mob easier, you do not have to apply any tactic, but simply overpower it. The game lost appeal for them.
Now take the role player: Let us think about a speech challenge, that is also depending on a puzzle and your charisma/speech statistics. You aim to get a key plus to raise your renown with the NPC. Shrewd answers plus your former actions influence the result.
Now lets make this more accessible. Strength check, if you have a bare minimum of strength, you can say “Just give me the key or face the consequences”. And it works.
The idea of levels/zones and green/yellow and so on color codes was that players always had some kind of challenge, so that fighting would no become boring. Initially.
“Hogger” in woW was a beast and required a team, it was an exciting feat to kill him. Today: No more parties in starter areas, you are all alone, so he was made more “accessible”. Hogger dies when you fart, so please don’t. Wow…
Now let’s take WoW as example… again. It is all about fighting, solo, in groups or in raids. Please, nobody tell me that roleplaying abounds in WoW or that it can serve as more as glorified chat interface besides the mob fighting.
But nowadays mobs die quickly. Heroic Mode is not heroic. You do not play differently than in normal mode. You can simply overpower mobs by spamming an area attack. So this game is about organizing your inventory to maximize the loot you can carry. So that you can buy the very same item for 25 badges that everyone has?
Game BALANCING was once not the lowest common denominator, but was the difficult task of making things hard, but not too hard. Some areas would intentionally be harder to do than others, others easier. Nowdays? We often see the mistake I mentioned, games get dumbed down so that they lose a lot of their potential.
The idea is that of nurturing the skills of the players while he is playing. Just like people get better at doing things if they do them.
Player skill would factor in, it is YOU who is contributing, not only your gear/stats. Have you ever been invited to join a guild based on nothing else but your gear and the notion that you do not seem to be a movement cripple, that your gear is more than sufficient and so on?
The new idea seems to be to make all dungeons accessible for everyone. Everyone seems to feel entitled to see every bit of content because he paid for it. I wonder why I am studied, paid for it and why I am still did not get a Nobel prize???
OK, this is a game, and not a e-peen contest… but there is a lot of e-peen contest going on in MMOs, and it does not get better if everyone gets everything handed on a silver platter.
The idea to reward better players with achievements is… well, a carrot. The achievements unfortunately always boil down to doing this or that in a totally retarded way and still win by doing so. I just find it mildly irritating that I have to artificially raise the difficulty of an encounter by playing dumb, only with the left hand or something like this.
How about a smart and strong boss encounter? What? Some people might not be able to do it?
They will for sure never be able to do it, as they are used to getting everything nerfed and handed of a silver platter. This is a good way to totally ruin a game that is so extensively focused on combat.
Players get better if you challenge them mildly and increase difficulty. The game unfolds its potential. It will keep people interested.
Make it easy and accessible and the game will never excite people.
Tesh once mentioned Atlantica Online because he liked the turn based tactics part. Make the mobs so dumb that they hurt themselves and it becomes shallow.
This is what happens to many games nowadays.
A game that was totally ruined for me was WOTLK. Raiding and heroic dungeons were more of a chore than interesting. I knew after the first two dungeons that I will make them all without breaking a sweat and that I would not have to struggle at all.
Well, two weeks later Naxxramas was almost cleared and I was bored by daily chores… erm quests and heroic dungeons. I stopped playing.
WoW would have to change its system fundamentally to interest me again, but just having to press the button for rain of fire or the aoe spell of your class to make it through heroic dungeons, tanks never losing aggro anymore at all, it just became dull quickly.
I don’t think that Shamus is against difficulty so much as he wishes companies would understand the need for more than a pass/fail system. That’s relatively easy to set up in a single player game… but nearly impossible in an MMO. I’m completely on board with those who say “I paid for the game, let me see all the content”, especially in WoW where darn near anything is available with enough time investment. Skill is irrelevant.
That said, I believe that making truly Heroic variations of content is a good thing. Let anyone and everyone see all the content, but reserve some rewards for the hardcore gamer. (Yes, that means I’m differentiating “rewards” and “content”. It’s easy enough, despite games that treat them as equivalents.) If that means making scaling dungeons, do it. If it means some players go see Onyxia, only to be blasted into shiny bits of armor, do it. At least they were *there*, and have a reason to go back, rather than teasing them with gear and level checks before they can even go look. In a gear-centric game like WoW, gear rewards are an easy carrot, but what about Guild Wars? “Perfect weapons” and armor are easy to get. What do the elite players there strive for?
New shinies, new titles, unique looking gear, and unique fluff are one way to motivate the pride cycle that keeps the elite playing the game. Ironically enough, that’s also how to motivate microtransactions.
More and more, I think that MMOs should have a definite “end”, and a relatively narrow power band. Let players interact and make the world interesting and alive, rather than trying to outrace them with more levels and gear. Let players play what amounts to an extended tutorial (like GW’s 1-20 storyline), then give them power to change the world, and let them make the world an interesting place. Let them create economic niches, conquer geography, and live in these fictional worlds, rather than simply autopilot through the grind.
[…] but a serious topic that was introduced to my head via Tish Tosh Tesh’s post about Challenge, strangely enough. Howie Mandel I am […]
As you can see, this prompted a tangent of thinking on a game where loot isn’t a focus. It only includes 1 example of gameplay regarding this, but it’s designed more to be a discussion than anything else.
Thanks for the link; I think it’s a very good question, and very relevant to the pontificating I’m doing around here.
I want to design and play a game where loot is just a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Where playing the game itself is fun, from day one until my avatar keels over of old age. (None of this “it starts at the level cap” filth.) Where I can play with anyone of any level, and have a great time and make significant contributions based on my personal skills… or play solo if I darn well feel like it.
Shifting the focus from gear to gameplay is a pretty clear mandate in my mind.
We should join forces and make this game you and I dream of. Doesn’t have to be all special-effecty, just a game that demonstrates you don’t need loot to have a good MMO 😛
We’ll have to do away with levels, classes and item-centric thoughts. It will have to be alluring in other ways, such as … erm … uh … crap ><
Man, doing something like that for real would require some real brainstorm time 😉
But in all seriousness, I think you’d need a game that was dynamic in its execution. Things would need to be able to be random or change on their own without patches and things of that nature. I dunno, I’m starting to like the idea of having everything needed to complete an instance IN the instance itself and you gaining it as you go.
There could be any amount of puzzle solving, platforming, killing, gearing up … and when its done you have a little trophy to put in your house 😛 Of course, you could fit crafting in there by providing the basic armor and weapons you’d need … possibly having the rewards from the instances being little adornments you add to the weapon / armor to make it better. I don’t know…
A great discussion, as per usual.
My idea of a great way to give players a reason to play is have a more dynamic version of PvP or PvE. Have factions attack other cities and ACTUALLY level the entire city. Have the other faction have the chance to push them back and reclaim the land, then rebuild..
Really, I think the thing MMOs need is more interaction with their enviroment and the NPCs. As of right now all of these things are just static backdrops that do nothing…
I want to hit up peasants for protection money to “protect” them from the thieves guild…or something akin to that.
Absolutely, you two. Dynamic content with player interactivity is something that I really think would be fantastic. Let “classes” come from player actions, and “challenge” from player choices. It’s scary for a dev to want to cede that sort of control to players, but it’s about the only way to make the world more alive.
Danshir, this kind of competitive gameplay is pure horror to those who always say they want to play a game, not fight versus other humans with a chance of failure.
I will pick up an idea that I read on Shamus blog: The ideal MMO or game in general would appeal to everyone and be playable at every difficulty level, so that everyone can experience it to the fullest.
Bull. Totally.
Surgeons, professional musicians, well educated persons can for sure appreciate simple songs or just having a relaxing small talk.
But they do not get a thrill out of it, excitement, fun, as if they would have a game or something else tailored to their needs.
The idea that a game needs to be accessible and fun for everyone is something that companies would like, everyone would be able to subscribe or pay in another way for their game.
But what happens? The lowest common denominator comes into play, you have a bit of everything and the game remains shallow and bores everyone equally.
I think that the more people played computer games, the more watered down they became. Consoles still retain some more challenging games, not because the designers like a challenge, but because the challenge is part of the gameplay and enjoyment of the game itself.
Most gamers are neither extreme hardcore nor people that cannot deal with any kind of challenge.
THIS should be the target group for MMOs, Joe Average. It yields the most money and is the potentially largest group of players.
Balancing is the arbitrary act of finding a balance between too easy and too hard, not finding a way to make everything possible for everyone.
Artificial concepts have arisen, the hard/heroic modes, in both GW and WoW. I think this is a good idea in general, but I wish we could do without it.
Because… what do the players actually do? NOBODY bothers with normal mode dungeons except for the required first run through it in normal mode or normal difficulty in WoW/GW.
Rewards are tied to the difficulty, giving people an incentive to play at higher difficulty. And then people try heroic mode and notice, it is a bit harder, but not really that much harder. It is just reducing the treshold for mistakes and does not demand any more sophisticated tactics at all.
IMO: You cannot make a game for everyone, and trying to make it for as many people as possible can destroy the game if you always feel the need to go for the lowest common denominator.
TEMPERANCE is an age old virtue for humans, and it is also a virtue for game design. It avoids the extremes and aims for the “golden” middle. There would still be room for very challenging and very easy games out there. Games get bogged down if they get too complex, yet they often cannot deliver if they are too simplistic either.
Embrace moderation in game design! 🙂
Great discussion. Not much to say except “I agree” on most points, but wanted to throw in a side tidbit:
The subscription model is again to blame, in WoW at least. The sense of entitlement since they pay the same, they should get the same.
Under a more sensible billing scheme you could keep areas of WoW as hard as you want.
Chris F: “Under a more sensible billing scheme you could keep areas of WoW as hard as you want.”
This. You want to be what the community calls a “mouth breather” and dance naked all day in Arenas for your epics? Fine, do it. But don’t whine that Naxx or Ulduar or whatever raid instance is new is too hard because you don’t possess the mental capacity to not stand in the fire.
I’d love it if Blizzard made little modules that were as tough as the original Sunwell, or the original Vashj or the original Gruul and let people pay for them so they could get truly epic loot. As it sits, they need a new level of “epic” because everyone and their mom has purples now and it’s nothing special anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like the gear driven atmosphere in WoW, but its their design and they need to keep it going. Hell, don’t even make the gear you get from paid areas better, just give it a different skin and make it red (lettering, like epic is purple). Make it unique so people know who can handle a challenge and who can’t. *shrugs*
This is why I’m looking forward to content-monetized microtransaction games. If you don’t pay for the Uber Dungeon of Killingstuff, you can’t complain that it’s not designed for you. Money talks, and as Chris has rightly noted elsewhere, it’s a great positive reinforcement and indicator for where the devs should spend their time creating content in the future. If nobody is buying housing, don’t sweat making it better. If everyone is buying the Glowy Bits of Particle Effects shoulderpad enchantments, make a wider variety of them.
When it comes time to tie that into challenge, aye, Wiqd, just tie the most “specialest” Glowy Bits only come from the most Uber dungeons. They may even be purely cosmetic, but hey, they are unique!
Of course, I’d prefer challenge merely exist for the sake of giving players things to do, rather than special loot to preen about… but that’s the purist in me that favors gameplay over ego.
Regarding difficulty, how about this suggestion:
Make it initially very hard. Only the top 10% of players/guilds will be able to defeat it.
1-3 months later – once those uber players have moved on. Nerf it a little. Make it a little easier so that those who couldn’t do it before, might be able to now.
3-6 months later – make it so that the average player can finish it (finally).
sdg, that wouldn’t bother me at all, but I suspect there would be much whining from those who see raiding as their ticket to self worth, as their “achievements” are devalued. That’s why I figure that difficulty levels built in from the outset might be a cannier way to go.
I can never figure out those Trackback thingies.
Great discussion here guys, here are my thoughts:
http://word-of-shadow.blogspot.com/2009/02/i-loot-whore.html
[…] but a serious topic that was introduced to my head via Tish Tosh Tesh’s post about Challenge, strangely enough. Howie Mandel I am […]
[…] but a serious topic that was introduced to my head via Tish Tosh Tesh’s post about Challenge, strangely enough. Howie Mandel I am […]