Tobold is kicking around another ideological tin can, prompting a few responses here and there.
Larisa weighs in on morons and NPCs (Gevlon variant impending, I’m sure)
KIASA’s Melmoth writes of reality TV
Klepsacovic writes about communities
Even Raph Koster tosses in his two bits
Oh, and I wrote about this before in a few different forms, albeit tangentially as I so often do.
Bottom line, I don’t want to need other people, but I want the option of playing with others if I feel like it.
Beyond the bottom line, Henchmen open up a game, as evidenced by Guild Wars and its NPC flunkies. For challenging content, yes, people are still better (though maybe it’s nice to challenge one’s self by managing a party, as another sort of challenge). NPCs are better than a PUG sometimes, though, especially if the kids might wake up at any moment and need a hug.
I would love WoW if I could play group content with NPC henchmen. (OK, and if they would ditch the subscription model.) I would still go play with other people sometimes because I enjoy doing so. (And incidentally, it seems to me that Dungeon Finder runs would be better if they were formed with people who want to play with others, rather than those who must play with others to get the shinies. Henchmen NPCs would help that in my eyes, by letting the mercenary players just go do their own thing and letting sociable players get together with less static in the system.)
Ultimately, it’s up to the players and if they want to socialize at all. Sometimes I’ll fire up Puzzle Pirates just to go talk to some old friends. Sometimes I just want to go Shipwright alone or take out my sloop with some NPCs (effectively soloing small scale group content, with a nice variety of challenge levels that vary by scaling somewhat to my interest and ability). It’s nice to have several options and not be hobbled because I don’t have others to play with or the inclination to do so. And yes, I do invite others to my humble little ship to play as a group sometimes, but it’s when I want to, not something I have to do to play the game.
Why do we play with each other in WoW at all? What if the loot and leveling were removed? What if it really was just all about the play and socializing? Is pure multiplayer gameplay without loot bribery a viable community building tool? Even WoW had to incentivize guild membership via yet another rep grind with silly boosts (Gasp! XP accelerators! Minipets! Shinies!) to get people together.
If the question is “what happened to people playing together?”, I suggest it has far less to do with soloability and far more to do with the actual play. If something isn’t fun to do with other people, making the payoff bigger or forcing players to play together isn’t actually solving the problem.
As Raph notes, retention is sometimes strongly rooted in social ties (though Gordon rightly disagrees, pointing to the Skinner Box mechanics), and as I’ve noted before, the people really are the best part of these things… but they are also the worst part. It’s wise to let players participate in your game world (indirectly socializing, and still playing/paying) while they sift out the sympathetic players from the unfriendly ones. That means strong solo options to keep people invested in the world while they are sorting, and good mechanics that don’t punish those players who want to play together.
And maybe, just maybe… a good game to play, instead of just more numbers (jump ahead to 4:21 for the numbers bit).
I share your sentiment, but there’s the problem of challenge. Someone demands challenge; I’m not quite sure who, but clearly someone wants it. So content has to be tuned and that is easiest with predictable group sizes.
I wonder if a world with unlimited raid sizes and some sort of scaling content would work. It would be more social, but possibly less challenging. Or too hard if for some reason all your friends were the wrong class.
That’s one thing that Puzzle Pirates does well (among many). Their group content scales to the “might” of the players, giving an appropriate base level challenge. If the players are successful, the next skirmish is tougher, with a better payout. If they lose, the next fight is easier, with a poorer payout. The balance keeps shifting to try to always challenge the players a bit without punishing them too much. It’s fairly granular, since the scaling is between fights rather than dynamically changing within a single fight, but over the course of a good hour or two, you can ramp up to some pretty tough fights… and some very lucrative rewards. There are also tougher areas to start in to jump right into some more difficult content, though it also ramps. It’s a great system for letting players settle on their own challenge level simply by choosing where to sail and then playing.
There are also high challenge, high risk, high reward areas with slightly different mechanics. Almost like WoW heroics, in a way. There are also large scale fights either as PvP or group PvE, where many ships get in on the action, each with its own crew of five to 100 or more players. These “blockades” can be pretty rough or a lot of fun, depending on what you’re looking for.
Oh, and it’s always open PvP, but you can only attack more powerful players or those that are pretty close to your own “might rating”, a measure of the aggregate recorded skill of your crewmates. (It’s all player skill-based, not level-based.) If you try to gank someone weaker than you, a NPC ship comes and rips you to shreds.
I love that.
One thing to bear in mind is that there are a LOT of players who don’t want to need other people, but do want other people to need them (ie. can get a group whenever they feel like it, etc.)
LOTRO offers “Skirmishes” since the Mirkwood expansion.
They scale with player number (1,2,3,6,12,24), level and come in three tiers of difficulty.
The beauty is that some skirmishes feel better with more mobs and also offer more interesting options you don’t get as solo player. The bad is that the pure skirmish marks gain – they are used for a lot by now – is faster, easier and more efficient if you solo play on a low difficulty.
This system spawns more mobs the more players there are, GW goes the other way and replaces missing players with NPCs. Those scripted NPCs are a lot smarter than WoW players and also have a fashion sense that prevents them from running around in oddly colored rags.
Designers unfortunately don’t get over the “one MMO for everyone” idea nowadays. Some LIKE the challenge, some NEED the challenge, others hate it. I.e. those that quit if they get beaten, regardless that modern MMOs tend to be so extremely easy and forgiving that I do not like them anymore. There is no fun in fighting mobs that simply can’t kill me in huge numbers even if I don’t give my best.
But no, this all gets reserved to supposedly heroic dungeon instances, the world itself no longer offers any danger to the player and rather points him around with a quest marker arrow.
But it is not only WoW. On normal difficulty I can set my ship in Star Trek Online to autofire and go to toilet, I will win and take only moderate damage.
While I am personally not interested in a modernized DIKU MUD EQ style regardless how well it is done, aka Rift, it does a lot of things really well, and that is that the mobs CAN kill you if you are absolutely careless.
Forget about WoW when it comes to “socializing” and everything related to it. It is about as social as Farmville, you are wanted when you are needed to contribute to the personal advancement of someone else.
Years ago it was common to state that WoW brought the MMORPG to the masses. Nowadays I would rather say that it left all but the mechanics of MMOs behind, and it got worse with every year.
I don’t like the idea of henchman in MMOs as to me it defeats the point of playing a MMO. If I wanted to be alone or play with computer NPCs then I’d just play a single player game like Dragon Age. Surely the entire point of a MMORPG is the fact that you have to play together with other people in teams?
It’s why I find the whole soloing thing very strange. The ability to play alone in MMOs is essentially an answer to the demand of players wanting to micro-achieve as quickly as possible. The player is driven to level up or item progress and thus takes the quickest course of action. Turns out grinding alone is the quickest way and soon becomes the most popular activities so thus developers start to cater to this thus creating a self perpetuating cycle of soloing and an achievement driven culture.
“Surely the entire point of a MMORPG is the fact that you have to play together with other people in teams?”
Nope. That’s what some argue, but as I’ve noted more than once, that’s just one method of play in these things. Multiplayer does not explicitly denote “playing together”, especially in a persistent asynchronous world.
Longasc, skirmishes sound like a good idea. I think scaling content is a smart addition to an MMO. It’s probably more work to set it up than the WoW “play in five man groups” design, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.
Spinks, NPCs need you too.
(You can get a group of henchmen whenever you want in GW, for example. If it’s about neediness and wanting praise of others, well, that seems like a personal problem, not a game design problem.)
The first MMO I played seriously (after EQ but I don’t consider my time there serious) was SWG. The sandbox nature of that game was fantastic and the player cities and housing made it a great place to be. We had a lot of people around and we would hold events purely for players and they were well attended. Yes it was an RP community but I have so many amazing memories of just spending hours sitting around typing into chat boxes with an amazing bunch of people. There wasn’t any raiding, no real high level instances at all back then but the fact you could build communities and engage with them was ace. Unfortunately we then got the NGE which took things down the WoW path and the game imploded but I have never yet experience the same kind of social atmosphere I got from SWG.
Zoot, I just left a very long comment at pink piggytail inn covering something very much like this. >.<
I shall make it much shorter here.
For Guild Wars, and Atlantica Online (from what I've seen of it), if we leave out all the social stuff, the other strange humans are probably bad but occasionally possibly good players factor… there is at least one more thing.
When I play with H/H, I wield my party. When I play my character, I wield my character. When I play with my heroes, and someone else with their heroes, we wield our parties and combine them.
It's the closest thing I've gotten to good old CRPGs like Wizardry.
Please peepul! *runs around squealing* Don't forget this aspect too! It's a very shiny one!
ZP, I do lament that I never played the old SWG on occasion. It looked interesting to me when I heard about it, and from the sound of it, I’d have liked it, but as it was a sub game, I didn’t bother with it. I didn’t have a consistent internet connection then, either, come to think of it. Alas.
nugget, i really love “wielding” a party. It lets me play with strongly defined classes without giving up flexibility. I’m spoiled by games like Final Fantasy Tactics and yes, even Atlantica Online. GW makes me happy.