Hey, someone else gets it. Shamus over at Twenty Sided wrote up a couple of articles that cover pretty much the same terrain I did a while ago.
Experienced Points: The Crime of Punishment (and the original Twenty Sided mention of the same, each with their own comment thread)
As with Super Meat Boy or 2008′s Prince of Persia, success in the challenges (the act of overcoming obstacles) has nothing to do with how painful punishments are (what happens if you fail). You still have to pass the reflex tests or execute the strategies. You’re just not kicked in the head if you fail in those games. This is a Good Thing in game design.
(Though better, perhaps, would be if it were one option among several, with increasing levels of punishment and/or challenge for those who want them. Y’know, player-controlled Variable Difficulty.)
Also, as a bonus, in the Escapist comment thread, Doctor Professor over at Pixel Poppers offered some links to articles he wrote on the subject. Great reading, those, and a blog I’ll be perusing a fair bit, I think.
Test Skills, Not Patience: Challenge, Punishment and Learning
Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers are Afraid of Easy Mode
***Back to Balance next article, I think… this was just something I couldn’t let pass.***
Edited to add:
Bonus great article on the differences between Mirror’s Edge and Prince of Persia.
I subscribed to this blog, thanks for sharing the links.
I agree to “Doctor Professor” (he could use a new name!) … but transferring Mega-Man to MMOs does not work out too well.
He is damn right, I (or we, think this applies to most if not all people) want people to play the way I do, to see things the way I do, and those are usually the people I am playing with, after all. So I want more of them. Elitism would be the opposite, to prevent people from joining the oh-so exclusive club. BUT even in this case who would not be happy for some new buddies to play with, after they “mastered” the challenges and obstacles to become part of the club?
But will this work for MMOs?
Young kid, teenager, his girlfriend, your wife, someone’s grandma, a pvp-fan and a casual gamer and someone working nightshifts, can they all be included in one big happy MMO family? Can a MMO really cater to EVERYONE?
I am not a fan of raiding, after doing a 5 hour Helegrod run that was fun and well done, I nevertheless say I no longer want to do this. Time is only one factor, it is also not my favorite kind of organized mass activity, I prefer chatty but even more challenging 3-man (small fellowship in LOTRO terms) runs so much more. Notice I say they can be even more challenging than this particular raid.
Raiders in my guild have a hard time to understand when I say I am simply not interested in raiding Barad Guldur.
They wonder… my gear is excellent. I have proven that I can do “difficult” stuff, they like to ask me for advice… what’s wrong with me? What the hell, why does this guy suddenly not want to raid?! WTF!?!
Now put me in the position of a veteran explaining a new player in the SUPER EASY tutorial that by now, very much like in Cataclysm, seems to extend itself to the entire world till level 50-60 or so! It is near impossible to die to a horde of world mobs anymore in LOTRO.
This really pisses me off. I have a hard time explaining new players why. They probably won’t understand my position and assume an elitist or somewhat stupid whatever else view on my part.
Cataclysm supposedly has much more difficult dungeons than players were used to. But the World of Warcraft has become VERY VERY VERY easy. You know I have ranted about that.
That’s bull. Imagine a player grown up in this world environment to reach the dungeon endgame. From Kindergarten to a graduate study at University? This does not work.
I suggest a bell curve for MMO difficulty. Most players are medium skilled, so this group gets the most stuff designed for. Raiding should remain exclusive to the very ambitious raider kind of player, it should NOT become the main game! But it has in WoW. There are also not so killed players, the left end of the bell curve. They still have stuff to do, but if they want to get more, they can and will have to improve to get to the medium difficulty stuff. Or they simply stay content with what they do.
I do not think it is possible to design content for everyone.
A variable difficulty dungeon so that the bad, the normal and the supreme player can play it together won’t work. It would also be very hard to design a dungeon that rewards everyone and is fun to everyone.
Now take a guess why nobody plays level 3 skirmishes in LOTRO and rather plays on level 1: Lots of risk, potions and effort required, and the rewards are no at all worth the effort, it’s better to do it at lowest difficulty, boring but much much more rewarding. I play on level 2, it’s still easy but a little more rewarding.
This only works for skirmishes that only drop more or less skirmish marks and tokens depending on difficulty. But this system is not there for dungeons. To get the reward of a dungeon you either get the “superior third mark” by random luck of the draw or you must complete the optional “hard mode” at max level.
This said, I find it difficult to find the right difficulty for everyone and think it is impossible. I also pointed out why I think that variable difficulty is also difficult to get right.
My main gripe is that – except Rift! – every new MMO seems to insist on extremely dumbed down early player experiences without any risk. I do not think this is necessary, as the harsh penalties to failure have largely been eliminated. This won’t work, I believe most players are of AVERAGE skill, hear hear… so create content for them, and not for the worst players. In the end designers will bore the whole right side of the bell curve if they design their world with the extreme slacker in mind.
[...] I can unlock content at my own pace. Loose and informal grouping. Able to provide ok challenge without at the same time having punishing penalties for failure (like others before, you get a hit to your equipment durability rather than experience points, [...]
“Raiding should remain exclusive to the very ambitious raider kind of player, it should NOT become the main game! But it has in WoW.”
I think this is a crucial point. Raiding is perhaps the worst treadmill in the game, the most unabashedly grindy segment of a grindy game. It’s also the least worldy, though it does tend to lean heavily on lore. I have very little interest in it, but I don’t mind that it exists.
And yet, I don’t think that it should be the core of the game’s design. I think the world at large should be the focus, making the entire game richer with each expansion. That’s why I like Cataclysm; it at least makes some moves in that direction.
Anyway, if raiding really is going to be the focus of design, *of course* it’s going to be “dumbed down” so anyone can play it (eventually, anyway, not necessarily everyone on day one). That’s just good investment on dev time and money. Don’t spend a lot of time on exclusive content generation. (They even cite that as the reason for killing class-based questlines, the hypocrites.)
…though looking at that bell curve again, overlay that on dev time and effort; high difficulty stuff would naturally get short shrift and little dev time if you went that way. Seems to me we’d hear even more weeping and wailing then.
I think the real issue with hardcore raiding, or PvP for that matter, is how it can easily skew, if not the overall design, at least the class balance in the game, and the player base’s perception itself gets affected
In my experience, even when the endgame, be it raiding or top PvP, is out of reach of the majority of the player base, whatever is deemed unviable at the top of the pyramid trickles all the way down to the lowest levels in the game.
This affects the leveling stage of the game – players who make choices different than the cookie-cutter endgame have a harder time getting groups and are often ridiculed for their choices even at stages where such considerations make no sense at all.
And beyond that, we have the good old disconnect between the leveling game and endgame that gets commented upon every so often, but remains true on so many MMOs – leveling up and endgame are sufficiently different that the former doesn’t really teach the player anything to prepare them for the latter content.
I think one of the smarter design decisions in that respect is when raids are added not just at the endgame but are made part of the leveling path. I’m not sure if WoW fixed that nowadays, but aside from the tourism aspect, neither in BC nor in Wrath was there any reason nor incentive to run the old vanilla instances as part of a player’s levelling progression – the barrier to entry was simply too high, the rewards too low to make it worthwile. In terms of the present discussion, the challenge / risk / reward triplet just didn’t work.
Raiding or other “hardcore” endgame activities certainly help one aspect of game design, solving the “what does a player do when he reaches the level cap” problem. The question though may perhaps become how to design one single consistent game experience rather than two different sub-games only loosely connected. Because any game where the playerbase overwhelmingly believes that “the real game only starts at level cap” has probably made some boneheaded design decisions somewhere – more so if most of it is only accessible to 5% or less of the players.
Good to see you up and around again, Altitis.
You’re right, the “two games in one” does naturally show some stresses when players who love one are shoved into the other. I do disagree a little bit with Longasc in that I think games can have elements to appeal to everyone… but I agree with him that the game’s focus can’t be on pleasing everyone. I think the “raiding vs. leveling” and even “PvE vs. PvP” divides show that you really can’t try to make one screwdriver for all the screwy players out there.
The focus on the endgame still bugs me, though. I can see the financial impetus for corralling players into the highly repetitive and addictive grindy stuff; it’s the best payout for the devs on their investment. It’s just… I actually like finishing games. I hate games that keep asking me to pay money to play. There’s nothing in the typical MMO endgame that appeals to me, except for some unique visuals and lore snippets. I’m convinced that it’s not healthy either for the game or the players to keep stringing them along in the endgame.
Interestingly enough, Wolfshead has a post up on a parallel tangent today, about the destruction of the social atmosphere in MMOs. A shift of the challenge / risk / reward equation is definitely to blame here.
Worth reading (but I know you all do)
“There’s nothing in the typical MMO endgame that appeals to me, except for some unique visuals and lore snippets.”
Completely agree. Once I’ve seen all the leveling content I’m usually completely done with an MMO. Raid to get better gear to raid some more just isn’t my idea of compelling gameplay.
LoTRO during the SoA era was my one exception so far. Back then when you hit the cap, you could raid, get serious about crafting, work on 6 man content, or do PvP to get gear that was all roughly on par. The best possible gear involved an admixture of all of the above activities. There were also long solo deed grinds you could embark on that would provide enhancements to your character independent of your gear.
When I first capped, I crafted myself a very nice set of gear, and was able to see all the raids without having to gear up in them. I got to see the lore snippets and cool visuals without having to go through the same content dozens of times. Crafting all that gear was a chore (it was fairly hard to crit one shot recipes back then), but one I didn’t mind.
It’s puzzling to me that more MMOs don’t give players a variety of options for endgame activities. A “raid or quit” style endgame means I’m gone pretty soon after I cap.
It appears that Dr. VanHowzen, who I last met in the Alliance trauma centre in Theramore , has come up with a solution to the problem of separating challenge from risk! No more wipes!
Jeebus, so many interesting article links in one post Tesh…! *gasp*
But then I needed some good weekend literature hehe, cheers!
I’ll just agree on the variable difficulty. It doesn’t matter to me if someone wants to get through to the end on some sort of easy mode, as long as the developers don’t kill the hard mode in granting it. Although I think getting through on hard mode should give some token others can see – and I can see this conflicting with the ‘must obsessively collect everything, but my gaming skill is crap, yet my complaining skill is loud’ crowd.
Other than that the article is full of mistakes. Having checkpoints is vastly different as you can simply run into something, die, and then all you have to remember is that that something was there. Anyone with functioning short term memory can pretty much make it. Having no checkpoints doesn’t allow that slack ‘oh, so I should avoid thingie X’ play. His civilisation example relies on difficulty levels, which doesn’t address ‘punishment’ at all, given the high level difficulty levels would ‘punish’ him back to the start of the level on the first time he played.
The fact is, punishing does make for more challenging, if there is any skill component. Because when there is no punishment, you don’t have to really try to get through – you can just let yourself fail more times without bother to avoid that. Because avoiding that would be more challenging. And effort.
And finally mass appeal…
I bet this guy has complained about mainstream movies, where everythings dumbed down and popcornised for fear of confusing the audience. But if he hasn’t complained about that, okay, atleast he isn’t in conflict with his own supposed goals, so I get that that works for him. If he’s never complained of that, that is.
And honestly, “Don’t confuse a true test of skill with punishment”? Like a true test where if you fail, no one says “Oh, lets pretend you suceeded and you can head on past anyway”?
If you’ve got to hit the bullseye itself on your first arrow shot BUT if you miss entirely, you move on as much as if you hit the bullseye…where was this true test of skill he speaks of?
Honestly, I think some people just can’t say “I don’t want a challenge” – their male ego wont permit them. So they have to deride the very elements of challenge to try and avoid eating their greens, so to speak. Why not just say you don’t like eating greens? Peer pressure?
[...] only skimmed these, but I’ve written on difficulty before and even the “ease” of WoW, but as to gear, well, I really don’t like the [...]