Fri 22 Aug 2008
Does Leveling HAVE to be a Treadmill? NO!
Posted by Nick under Game Design, MMOG Discussion
[3] Comments
This article is in direct response to this thoughtful post over at Wolfshead Online.
“It seems to me that the real problem that is causing the clamor for the removal of leveling is the fact that content in MMO’s is not dynamic”
My favorite line of the whole post.. and this harkens back to a now few years old, yet seems to be ongoing or often revisited discussion between Wolfshead and I on the reason and purpose behind the actions you do.
If the content is stale, and there’s no “fun” to the leveling game, then THAT is the problem. Removing the leveling game is NOT the answer, but refreshing the experience to regain the apparent loss of “fun” value is key.
The fact that people get bored of actions, experiences, games, etc. is a well understood fact about game development. In a non-MMO game, it’s perfectly ok because you expect limited REAL replay-ability. An MMO on the other hand is expected to sustain interest and to be dynamic enough to keep the equation changing and thus, retaining the player’s interest in continuing to invest their time into the game. Some of this is flooding with many different choices of what to do catering to various gameplay styles, and some of this is simply making gradual modifications to existing gameplay and content to keep it “familiar, but different”. Funny how this theme keeps manifesting itself!
Speaking of “familiar but different”, I need to give kudos to my friends over at SOE for continuing to take time to revisit older legacy content in EverQuest II and refreshing it based on the needs of today. This kind of agile evolution in response to the changing needs of gamers really helps to make the most of the existing world. Of course, I’m speaking about the recent revamp of Everfrost by the lovely and quite talented MissDoomCookie, but even historically we’ve seen content revamps of quite a few zones including the Commonlands, Antonica, and more recently Runnyeye. I hope that the team will continue to devote at least a few spare cycles towards that end as it’s great for the health of the game.
August 23rd, 2008 at 5:28 pm
So, who should shoulder the burden of keeping leveling fun? Players or designers? A “virtual world” sandbox design shifts the burden to the players, and a single player game often shifts the burden to the designers.
An MMO is a weird sort of hybrid beastie that needs to split the burden, methinketh. Of course, if the only thing that players can do is /chat, /craft and /emote, their power is limited. PvP adds a few things, but I think what’s lacking is a sense that players can (and do) make a difference in the world.
…but yes, I agree, leveling doesn’t need to be boring. Good game design, and continual improvement/shuffling on the part of the devs, can go a long way to making an MMO worthy of continued attention.
August 23rd, 2008 at 5:56 pm
I understand and really it depends on the game. Particularly your game’s focus. If your intent is to deliver a virtual world of the sandbox variety, then it’s the game designers responsibility to decide the limits upon which the players can affect the world and provide tools and/or mechanism for which they can perform that impact.
If your focus is on the “game” virtual world, as we see with the PvE environment of most MMORPGs in the market today, then the game designer bears the responsibility of making sure that all of the content that exists in the game is palatable to SOMEBODY and that as many different play-styles are accommodated as possible within the scope of the world theme. When I say “content” I don’t just refer to things like zone geometry, mobs, or spells/items. I’m actually referring to enabling different things to DO in the world that are fun and iterating upon things you can ALREADY do to keep them fresh. Evolving storylines are one area that also makes sense to change, and to involve the player in that evolution as it takes place.
Let’s face it, there’s a TON of cogs in the wheel of a successful MMORPG and any one of them could be re-visited from time to time to keep the equation just a little bit more interesting than the last iteration. It’s really a balance of development, design, programming, and artist resources to have a certain amount of time devoted towards iterating on older content vs. the next expansion, for example.
Another difficulty in providing ever changing content lies in the business-side of things. Unless you provide all of these content changes as free game updates, it’s really tough to apply changes that only owners of the purchased expansion pack can see. If you try, you end up having to do sketchy things like maintaining instanced versions of the zones and the like. I’m personally still working out what would be a good plan of attack for this sort of thing… because that’s the kind of stuff I geek out on.
Thanks for the comment Tesh! =)
Cheers,
Nick
August 25th, 2008 at 12:08 am
I remember when I was a teenager, I had an amazing opportunity to visit Greece on a special high school trip. The art teacher that organized the trip drew our attention to one of the valleys there. It seems that many wars over many centuries had been fought there with the Greeks, Persians, Romans and others. I know there are many battlefields in Europe that are just as well-trodden that have been used in the course of great battles from the time of Rome to Napoleon to World War 2.
Why can’t MMO’s be like this too? Why do MMO devs have to keep pumping out new expansions with new landmasses?
New content is not always the answer. The solution is creating MMO mechanics that allow for dynamic change. That will require boldness and vision that is sadly in short supply. All we can really hope for is that the millions of WoW players will someday wake up and be hungry for a deeper MMO experience. Doing the bidding of NPC’s with gold question marks over their heads is not my idea of fun anymore.
-Wolfshead