I occasionally cater to a substrain of Altitis that I’m calling Altitis Contentis. It’s a mutation of the standard Altitis disease, distinct for its underlying drive to explore content in a game. That desire to explore, both game content and game mechanics, drives creation of alts, especially in MMO games with classes, races, and/or story branching points that necessitate more than one character to see everything.
It’s a fairly common malady among those who find themselves in professional positions in the game industry, considering that it’s occasionally difficult to approach games without reflexively analyzing them. It’s a bit like being a scientist or special effects guy watching movies; it’s hard to step back and turn the brain off when you’re professionally supposed to be able to do these things, and advance the state of the art or risk falling behind. I speak from experience there, too. Writers have similar troubles reading others’ work, especially if they have the proofreading gene. Generic Fantasy Novel #435 just doesn’t read as well when you can see rigid and unimaginative slavish adherence to the Five Act Drama construction, and see little more than stereotypical characters.
My latest bout with AC was a brief research trip into World of Warcraft, as I alluded to a bit ago. I fired up the trial again, and wandered around a bit as a fresh Night Elf Druid, then a good friend showed me the Draenei starting zone as a Draenei Shaman, then I took a whirlwind tour of some of the Death Knight introduction areas. That’s where I employed my super special character name: Sendoku. It’s a portmanteau of the Japanese words for “death” (or “crisis in battle”), “sendo“, and “poison”, “doku“. It’s completely unique, or so the Armory would have me believe. Perhaps it’s common on the Asian servers, but I was happy enough finding something thematic and interesting for an Unholy specced Death Knight.
Names matter.
Anyway, the first time I played WoW, it was back in early 2006, when you needed a friend code to try the game. A good friend at work noted my interest in the game, and let me have a shot at it. I fired up a Tauren Shaman, and took several dozen screenshots. I liked what I saw, but with a tight monetary and time budget, I knew I’d not be buying in. Still, it was fun to play, and Thunder Bluff is still my favorite capital city in any of the MMOs that I’ve played.
I’ve played a few times since, and done a bit of research since. I discovered that the Tauren homelands are among the most spread out in the game (so what seemed like a very slow game to me the first time around actually was pretty slow), and that Shamans are pretty underrepresented and somewhat underpowered. (I still like them, though.) I learned that the Skinning/Leatherworking pairing that I used was a pretty good one for Shamans, though I picked it as much for flavor as for function. I learned that I’d rather play a Druid, to make the most of my time, since it could play in any of the four standard roles (tank, healer, ranged DPS, melee DPS). I learned what those roles are, and how the Threat system works. I learned that the game that I was playing was even then outdated, and that “the real game” is raiding.
I’ve also played other MMOs, notably Puzzle Pirates, Guild Wars and Wizard 101. Brief dalliances with the trial or beta versions of a smattering of other games punctuated my research. Puzzle Pirates is an obvious outlier in the mainstream MMO world, and Guild Wars is often denigrated as being something less than a true MMO. Since we’re playing these things to preen and seek approval of our peers, of course we shouldn’t be playing anything less than a true MMO. In fact, if you’re not playing Darkfall, you should just sell your computer and go cry to sleep on your Carebear pillow.
Through it all, I’ve looked to WoW as one barometer. It’s not the epitome of what I’d consider good design, but it’s certainly successful enough to merit attention, and big enough to warp the industry and spawn a mess of “me too” MMOs. I’d be remiss in my research to ignore it.
This latest trip into the wilds showed me a few things that I’ve not experienced before. Some of this is probably old hat to you veterans out there, so forgive me if you don’t see anything new or insightful. It was a good trip for me, at least.
One, patch day is… frustrating. The time I had allotted to play the game was almost halfway consumed by patching the thing. Oh, the Trial version of the game worked beautifully, what with the “streaming in the background” bit, but to play the big, official game required a complete patch before even firing it up. I’m glad that games like Free Realms and Wizard 101 have adopted the “download in the background while you actually play the game” mentality. I can see where WoW vets might not mind taking two days to patch the game, since they are already hooked and invested, but it’s a bit annoying in a market that is increasingly nimble.
The bloated 15.1 GB footprint that the game takes might have something to do with that. I’m definitely leery of SWTOR, touting the notion of being “fully voiced”. That’s a LOT of data. Sure, “hard drives are cheap” for some, but that’s still a considerable chunk of data, and running on a less than optimal internet connection is painful, even if the game itself can be tweaked to functionality at playtime. Guild Wars (with all expansions) weighs in at 4.32 GB, and still manages to look impressive, even better than WoW in places. I’m not really calling foul on this one, since WoW does pack a lot of content… but that’s still a huge chunk of my hard drive. Perhaps it’s one more piece of the puzzle that is the monopolization of the gamer’s resources; time, money and hard drive (and maybe even bandwidth, if you’re capped).
Two, the newer zones are plotted better. The Draenei staring area is especially good with this, as most of the important quest landmarks have these huge purple/pink crystals that stand out from the rest of the deeper blue terrain. The quest hub is up on a hill with the wreckage of a spaceship, fitted with plenty more of those eye-grabbing crystals. Kaplan might whine about the “Christmas Tree” quest hub, but when I’m getting my legs in a new 3D space, I like having clear landmarks and one central place to use as my base of operations. I can still wander around and sniff the mutant roses, but if I want to get back in the business of progressing the storyline, it’s very clear where to go. (Guild Wars is the clear winner in this category, with clear indicators on the map of where you’re headed, but at least WoW is getting better.)
The Death Knight starting area is a nice open zone, with the Eeeevil Death Camp clearly up on the hill, and the people to terrorize conveniently in the valley below. It’s simple and subtle; high ground is friendly, low ground is where the fighting takes place. You’re given a mystical tour of the local town via the “floating eye” quest, which familiarizes you with the buildings you will be tasked with raiding in the near future, all from the relatively safe perch of a disembodied eye. It’s very forgiving, and very clear.
Oh, and as a bonus, dying just calls over a Valkyrie-like wraith that resurrects you where you stand, full of health and ready to roll. That’s a friendly noob experience. (That’s somewhat wasted on a prestige class, rather than real noobs, but I digress.) You may be Death’s right hand man, but you’re not living the school of hard knocks. No, that’s for those poor saps leveling baby Taurens.
Three, it’s easier to get around. I incidentally noticed that the Hearthstone cooldown has been chopped from an hour to half an hour. This is significant to my time-constrained play, and I’m greatly in favor of other speed-enhancing efforts that Blizzard has rolled out (or will roll out). I don’t like forced time sinks, and travel is one of them. (Again, Guild Wars wins out there, but at least WoW is making baby steps in that direction.) As always, those who want to take their time can still walk, but if you just want to get somewhere and get on with the business of playing, it’s easier than ever.
Yes, that may seem a little odd to hear from one such as I, a confirmed Explorer, but again, it’s about options. Sometimes I really do want to just walk around, but when I want to just press on and get things done, I can. I appreciate that.
*edited to add: And in a game that throttles Exploration by fairly strict level requirements, like WoW, sometimes I must Achieve in order to Explore, so it’s nice to get it out of the way as quickly as I can if I’m so inclined. It’s trivially easy to take more time on something; dragging your feet is a national pasttime. Being forced to take the long way around is more than annoying when there are better options.*
Four, critters in the wild now have more information in their “rollover” info box. As long as I can remember, you could put your mouse cursor over a critter and get some rudimentary information about it, but now, if you highlight a critter that happens to be a part of a quest you have active, you get a handy tooltip telling you which quests it is relevant to. Very nice.
Some might call this silly, and from a purist standpoint, it probably is. Still, I like it because it makes the game more fun to play (since I know that I’m going in the right direction), and really, you could handwave it aside and say that your avatar should know these things, and that the tooltips are just your avatar’s subsconscious telling you what’s going on.
Anyway, there’s a common theme to all of this. The game interaction is easier, faster, kinder. It’s often argued that this means the game is being “dumbed down”, and there’s something to that… but it’s likely just sour grapes. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not dumber, it’s smarter. The interface gets in the way of playing sometimes (just ask any raider who uses addons to even play the raiding game), and these streamlining efforts from Blizzard, all the way from the tooltips to the clean layouts of the zones, are about making it possible to play the game, rather than flail about fighting the interface or get your bearings in a 3D space.
Peripheral vision, sound, smell and other subtle “world space” cues that we don’t get from the standard “mouse and a monitor” interface often mean that we need other “senses” to get around in the worlds we play in. That’s where the “ESP” of the tooltips and map “tracking” tools come in. That’s where sparklies on plants come in. That’s why people use addons, or harmless hacks to pull the camera back farther than the default UI will let you. It’s all about giving you the information you need to play the thing, rather than fighting the UI to get that information, or Alt-Tabbing out to Thottbot or the like.
Bottom line, I’ve found that playing WoW is easier than ever, and that Blizzard is at least making token efforts to reduce the rightfully-hated grind. There’s still not a lot of gameplay that goes beyond the basic DNA of the DIKU roots, but it just feels easier to actually get in and start playing what is there these days. The clearer physical layout of the newer zones aids comprehension and spatial orientation, and there’s less time futzing around hoping that you’re in the right place. There’s less wasted time, and I appreciate that, as a time-conscious consumer.
I’ll stress this, though, for those who want to walk uphill to the questgiver twenty miles barefoot in the snow: You can always make things harder on yourself and go ahead and wait until level 40 for your mount, only use your Hearthstone every hour, or ignore your tooltips and map if you really want the “classic purist” WoW. There’s always that option. *edited to add: (Or, as Larisa notes over here, turn off your addons. Now that’s scary to some people, even to those who whine about how easy the game has become.)* Now, however, there are more options for those of us with shorter playing sessions (one big plus of the Hearthstone) and less time to waste.
WoW still isn’t a perfect game, but at this point, I’m happy seeing it making at least some small strides in the direction of playability. I’m still not paying a sub to play it, but I do think that the game is better than it was, and that changes in the docket at the moment are good changes. As a player, I appreciate the changes, and though they aren’t enough to suck me in, I look at them as a designer and as a player and nod in appreciation.
*I’ll be exploring the Death Knight a bit more later, as I’ve got some comments that I want to make about them. For now, this is already overlong, so please be patient and come back if you care about what I might have to say about those nasty tricksy kniggets.*
The Death Knight starting experience is really awesome, isn’t it?
Fun goes down once you enter Outland. They managed that you do not have to use colorful clown gear, as you can use many items and weapons and especially trinkets even in Northrend.
For veterans, one must note that the mobs got nerfed, still it is amazing how Death Knights TEAR through them and end up with more life and rune power than before the fight.
No wonder Death Knights and Paladins are the most played classes at the moment. I think you remember the statistics that were posted on “I Has PC”. They are good for soloing, good in groups and got the most goodies with the 3.x patches.
You are right that Blizzard made the game easier to play in the sense of improving the interface, skills, controls, tooltips and all that. I still have to tell you, the hellboars on Hellfire Peninsula were a lot more scary and interesting to fight when they had the potential to rip me to shreds! Yeah, running away in a futile attempt to escape death adds to my gaming experience.
Pulling a hellboar to you with the force grip is for sure fun, too, but it is still lacking in comparison.
Good game design also ends in the dungeons. They are set up with so much love and details, and then all that tanks and damage dealers do is spam AoE taunts and spells… thi is just bad!
Magister’s Terrace demanded a bit more than that, stuns, snares, teamwork – this got lost. Naxxramas was no that bad, on the other hand. It might have been easy, but it was for sure better as entry raid than Karazhan was.
The Hearthstone buff to 30 min cooldown is definitely good, as is earlier mounts for players. My warlock always envied mages. I just could not teleport to Theramore in the blink of an eye and back. Because I am a jealous person, I always molested them with the thing Mages and Pallies hate the most. It is not “fear” or the Warlock, it is the lovely Felpup and its spell-lock!
Aye, there’s a difference between difficulty wrought by fighting the interface, and difficulty created by creative and interesting game design. I’m very hard on the former, and pleased with the latter.
I firmly believe that there should be easy and difficult content for all skill levels, and that everyone should be able to access all of the content they paid for. Ultimately, I’m convinced that such means scaling dungeons (even for soloers) with concurrent rewards, and even user-chosen difficulty settings (not unlike the Heroic mode for raids).
Until that desirable game design happens, I’ll happily cheer for better UI and playability, while I let those of you who have a horse in the game fuss over the Carebearification of the overall game. I am sympathetic to the call for more skill, certainly… but do I think that maintaining access for the whole spectrum of players is a higher priority. If that means the outliers on the bell curve, the hardcore and the complete incompetents, wind up a bit underserved, it’s understandable.
Lamentable, certainly, but understandable.
More on DKs later. Overall, though, yes, I’m impressed.
The problem is that one size does not fit all. This is the problem that WoW is just now starting to grapple with. While the changes are awesome for you, the person who wants more challenge in their game but who loves Warcraft lore is getting the short end of the stick.
Let’s look at the hearthstone as an example. 30 minutes is better than 60, right? Well, really, why have a cooldown at all? Why limit the hearthstone to one location? Why not let people teleport around anywhere they want? Some people would find this to be a great change, but others who chose a class built on specific powers (like Mage teleportation to major cities) may not be so thrilled. Or, people who want the chance to run into other players doing quests in order to group up and find cool people are not going to have that opportunity. Instant, free teleportation means less chances to run into someone else.
Yes, you’ll say that we’re not to that point yet in the game. But, in some ways we’re already well past that point. As some of the recent nostalgia for EQ1 shows, some people actually did like the social opportunities that gameplay introduced despite the “I’d rather pound nails into my genitals with my forehead” glacially slow, forced-grouping gameplay it had compared to today’s games. Some people see the faster hearthstones and quicker mounts as more nails in this coffin, but in reality the coffin was already measured and cut years ago.
So, from my point of view, the point is kind of moot. If you try to start the game now without having friends, you’re not likely to break into any social groups anyway. WoW has shown that convenience trumps accomplishment all through its development, and that process has only gotten more streamlined as the game progresses. The people complaining now are way late to the party.
As I noted, if you *want* to walk uphill both ways, you still can. There’s nothing forcing you to get a mount or use your Hearthstone. (And yes, instant teleportation between cities would be great. No Hearthstone cooldown would be great. It can even facilitate grouping because you’re not dinking around waiting for people to get there. W101 even has a “teleport directly to a friend” mechanic that is brilliant for grouping, and their “hearthstone” mechanic has a 60 *second* cooldown.)
People can always make a game harder for themselves if they really want it that way. There’s a whole subculture over at GameFAQs that finds ways to make Final Fantasy games harder, for instance. (Just like there’s one that finds ways to beat Emerald Weapon with level 7 characters. People are weird sometimes.) It doesn’t work the other way, though; if the UI and gameplay pacing of an MMO are onerous, there are no legal ways around them.
It’s a bit like warm and cold weather. You can always add another layer of clothing if you’re too cold, but you can only take so much off if you’re too hot. And everyone has their own comfort temperature.
And yes, fighting the tide is sour grapes at this point.
That said, I’d encourage those who want that sort of abusive experience to find a niche game that offers it and support it. Darkfall, perhaps. It’s not a game that I’d ever play, but I’m glad that it exists, because it shows that the market is more mature and can support divergent opinions and playstyles. One size most certainly does not fit all (even notably in the monetization strategy), so yes, we really do need a more diverse set of options.
Brian has a point. IMO Flying Mounts did even more harm than the hearthstone cooldown.
Reasons?
Well, flying is AWESOME. But does this outweigh the fact that it was one more nail in the coffin of open world pvp? It was quite dead before, it just worse, IMO. Still, I hope you get my point. But this is not the only problem.
Difficult or dangerous pathways now suddenly simply do not exist anymore. Just hop on your mount and fly away. Gathering resources also got so much easier, just patrol the ore node spots on your map from above.
The slow turtle ship in Northrend is very fun, you can start fishing and socializing there. Or murder another player, as I did. We were two Alliance Warlocks and he was a Horde Rogue, and Warlocks have issues with Rogues. We decided to kill him before he even gets the idea to attack us.
A lengthy boat trip or even taking players with you on your transport mount is very cool and a good opportunity for socialization indeed!
But who does take the turtle ship when he can 1. use his flying mount and 2. has a 30 minute or maybe even zero hearthstone countdown?
The “do not use it if you do not like it” argument does not really apply there IMO.
Talking about the “bell curve”: Catering to most of the players, basically the “middle”, is the economical choice. Hardcore and ultra-casual players would lose, of course.
But today we have a designer mindset that goes for the very lowest common denominator. The left end of the bell curve. Not only hardcore players lose out, the huge customer potential in the middle also gets dissatisfied.
And I think this what happens nowadays, not only in WoW.
The idea of optional challenge is sound. But the implementation currently is not. Many optional bonus achievements (and this opens up another discussion, the achievement craze – but I won’t talk about that now), this is the way almost all optional challenges are presented, require players to do things is a very dumb and artificial way.
It is like asking a table tennis or soccer players to use the left hand for playing or only to kick with the left foot.
Guild Wars/ArenaNet had a brilliant idea with “HARD MODE”. It is basically the same as HEROIC difficulty in WoW.
What happend? HARD mode was hard at first. You could fail, too much failures and death penality and you were done. The rewards were better than in normal mode. Risk vs reward and it was HARD.
And this is what happened to HARD mode: Everyone felt entitled to reap the benefits of hard mode drops, but … it should not be that hard. Even if it is called hard mode.
ANet some time later the lowered difficulty of Hard Mode to Normal Mode. They introduced so-called consumables. Items that powered up the abilities, hit points, armor, energy, attack speed and all that of the person or even the whole party. Items that removed all death penalty.
Normal Mode became the option to allow everyone to progress. It became Easy Mode.
What did Bartle once say in his infamous article MMOs are designed by noobs? It seems he was right.
Note that I do not consider myself hardcore and do not feel much love for hardcore raiders or PvPers, I do not like the Darkfall “hardcore player” mindset at all.
But in my opinion the very lowest common denominator is a much more serious problem for all MMO players. We are not divided 50:50 in “Hardcore” or “Casual/Noob”, whatever.
Most players are not THAT hardcore, nor THAT casual or noobish. They have no use for extra hard or punishing content, nor for content where everything is handed to them on a platter.
Finding the middle ground is more difficult than finding the extremes. Yet it is of prime importance, as I believe this is the way to make MOST of your players happy players.
@Brian
Interesting point about the Heartstone. Does having one really make the game less challenging though? Does cutting it’s timer from 60mins to 30mins actually have any impact on challenge?
You mentioned the concept of removing the cooldown completely and letting people teleport anywhere. But what about going in other direction and removing it completely.
Look at the original Everquest where only caster classes could bind themselves to a location and there were no mounts at all. If that was implemented in WoW would it make the game more challenging? I think it would remain at the same challenge but just become more frustrating.
Exactly, Spitfire. Frustration is not challenge. Challenges can be frustrating, but that’s part of the point, as low levels of frustration can spur you on to get better. The frustration of fighting poor game mechanics, bad UI or blatant time sinks is an entirely different, and unwelcome beast, because you can’t do anything to change it. No amount of player skill improvement will change faulty game design.
Longasc, I’m not sure about flying mounts. I love the freedom to explore that they offer, but yes, they have introduced some unfortunate side effects. It makes me wonder how Aion will work, where everyone just flies anyway.
And yes, the current implementation of the range of challenge is busted. I cite it as an ideal, not an example, and GW’s Hard mode and WoW’s Heroic modes as small steps in the right direction of a better gradient… that don’t work as well as they might, as it happens. That doesn’t mean the idea is unsound. Implementation is hard sometimes.
[...] As I’ve noted before, the DK starting quests are very nicely designed, with a clear sense of progression, great spatial location, excellent art direction, and smart teaching mechanics. (The flying eyeball recon quest at the start is a fantastic way to show people around in a low stress manner.) Players don’t get a “this is an optimal DPS rotation” tutorial, but jumping in and playing a DK is a very smooth and forgiving experience. (Ironically so, perhaps, since such would seem to benefit newbies more than vets who have qualified for DKs by having a high level character somewhere.) [...]
[...] trend of choosing the underrepresented combos? (Dwarven Rogue? Whee!) How many cool sounding unique names can I come up with? How can I see as many starting areas as possible, and tinker with as many class mechanics as [...]