The Dumbing Down of MMOs
Wolfshead has two blog posts that really delve into this issue in great detail:
The Emasculation of MMOs: Part 1 – How Convenience Replaced Risk
The Emasculation of MMOs: Part 2 – Fun is for Children, Adventure is for Adults
Reading those posts, and the ones he links to from Keen’s blog, really made me miss some of my favorite features of MMOs that seem to be gone these days.
- Crowd control.
- Open dungeons with many teams in them, occasionally working together, helping each other, or accidentally training on each other.
- Death penalties that mattered.
- Pulling, mob camps, etc.
How about you all? What features do you miss from older MMOs compared to the newer, spoon fed style?
Crowd control and open dungeons are cool. Death penalties that “matter” suck, and pulling/mob camps were ridiculous. You shouldn’t have a party of 5 supposed “heroes” taking on 1 or 2 goblins at a time. It makes the player characters look like utter gimps. Traditional raiding sucks for the same reason. 40 players taking on one dragon isn’t epic. One player taking on 40 dragons is epic.
My experience in old school mmos is pretty limitted. Mostly because when I tried them, I didn’t play them for long. The “hardcore” elements often sounded fun in theory, but in practice they wound up being either frustrating, annoying, or stupid. After finding that out in a few games, I abandoned the genre until the second gen mmos hit. I had much more fun then.
Particularly bad is the way old school mmos tended to handle pvp. Stuff like alignment/reputation systems(any system where some variable goes up when you kill a player, said variable causing various nasty things to happen such as town guards attacking you on sight) were utter trash. Pvp death penalties have similar problems. Both of them discourage players from fighting eachother. WoW is actually far more welcoming to pvp than the old school mmos supposed “hardcore” pvpers reminisce over. What is stupid is that alot of modern pvp games try to ressurect ridiculous systems(Age of Conan, Darkfall, etc). If you are designing your game around pvp, why the heck do you include systems that punish players for fighting eachother? Ridiculous.
I totally disagree about death penalties. When people are suiciding all over the place as a convenient teleport, you failed. Death should have some kind of noticeable effect, otherwise risk is flushed down the toilet and all possible tension and excitement disappears.
Pulling from camps of mobs took a lot of skill and added a whole interesting dimension of gameplay. A player could be useful in a group solely because they were good at pulling. Anything that makes a real, player skill important is a good thing.
What’s wrong with a party of 5 heroes taking on 1 or 2 of a foe? What’s wrong with 50 heroes taking on 1 dragon? That ends up happening in games all the time whether you have pulling or not. And I actually find that more epic than 5 people killing 20 random crap mobs in some kind of AoE grind like you see nowadays without pulling and CC.
As for PvP death penalties: When I removed them from Threshold it actually hurt the game and really hurt PvP. In a roleplay setting, a lack of consequences makes it all seem pointless. Then you just have people farming each other for PvP points or whatever. That makes it more like a sport than anything that resembles a life or death struggle.
WoW isn’t even PvP, because there are no consequences at all and no effect. If I found out after a PvP match that it was bots, not players, that wouldn’t even surprise me. A round of PvP has no effect on anything – not even on the participants. At least in WAR a big PvP battle (in the orvr world, not in the scenarios) might have some kind of effect on the gameworld – however minimal. In DAoC, PvP often had tremendous effect on the world.
I think that difference of opinion boils down to whether you want PvP to be like a sport or if you want it to be like a conflict. I prefer conflict. It sounds like you prefer sport-like PvP.
What I want from PvP is to test myself against other players. Conflict is nice, but not when it makes PvP inconvenient. Any PvP mechanic that leads people to PvPing less is a bad one as far as I’m concerned. “Conflict” style pvp is fine, and so is “Sport” type pvp(though I prefer the Risktaker and Competitor labels). I agree that the “conflict” crowd isn’t served well by modern mmos, but I disagree entirely that the “conflict” style is the “real” pvp. FAR more pvp happens in a “sport” style mmo than a “conflict” style mmo.
As far as why 5 on 1 or 40 on 1 pve is bad, it makes the player characters seem weak, as though they can’t do anything by themselves. Especially when it’s 5 players vs something like a goblin. 5 characters vs 1 dragon is cool with me. 5 characters vs 5 goblins is acceptable. 5 players vs 1 goblin is just terrible though, especially if they don’t annihilate it within seconds. In my experience with old school “pull one from the camp” advancement type games, 5 guys taking 30-45 seconds to kill something as inconsequential as a goblin was common. This is one of the very few areas I care about immersion in a game that I’m not going to be actively RPing in. I want my character to feel like a bad ass.
The actual skill of pulling itself is fine to me. It definitely took some playerskill. Unfortunately, the consequences of that skill(5 people fighting one goblin) are just so unfun for me that I really don’t want to see games shift back to that model.
I want to make sure you know I didn’t say conflict was more “real” pvp than “sport.” They are just different. I personally prefer conflict, because there is a macro-purpose and meaning. Sports PvP can be fun as well, it just isn’t my preference.
My experience with pulling is you try to get as few as you can, but you still get more than 1 in groups and that’s where the CC comes in. In DAoC, the size of your party directly caused more “adds” so you didn’t just have 8 people gang banging a single mob. You’d get adds, that you’d need to CC, offtank, etc. But pulling 1 and getting X adds was done through skill, compared to some no skill schlub pulling willy nilly and getting 3, plus adds for each.
Well, DAoC is actually a pretty respectable game, from everything I’ve read it sounds like the best of the old school mmos, and probably the only one I would have liked. Pity I never played that one, I might understand where some of the old school nostalgia comes from.
This talk of old skool stuff made me take the hop and try a game I in theory would be interested in: Vanguard. Sadly, the list of small deficiencies has slaughtered it for me. I will be off to see if they care enough to know why in a survey form shortly.
I think it was Atlantica Online that used one of the theme of the Epic Quest that takes way too long: like a “kill 1000 goblins” quest. The difference by making it any type of goblin, as opposed to those goblins over there, changes the nature of the thing from a brief vacation (or a neverending prison) to just an extra bonus you’ll complete someday. A lot of the ideas are good, as most ideas are, but execution makes the difference.
One feature that just came to mind from typing that: is there any MMO out there that makes you pay for fuel for your vechicle? Hey for horses, etc?
Also don’t think the common man is really interested in “getting better” – otherwise the shmups.system11 and fighting forums would be much more popular. Since they’re purest genres of PvE and PvP skill… and I can’t blame them. I like free back rubs and relaxing progress bars, too. They must be tricked into developing skillz, and the threshold can never be set that high.
It’s interesting you bring up fighting games, as I’m a huge fighting game fan(SSF2T:HDR is my game of choice). I drive myself to improve constantly in games like that. I also try to do the same thing in MMOs. However, most of the “hardcore” MMO players assume I’m a skill-less noob that wants everything handed to me because I reject the highly inconvenient old school MMO trappings that they hold so dear.
The reason why I object to most of this stuff is that it’s inconvenient and time wasting. You get better at a game by playing it. The more you play, the better you as a player should be getting at the game. Time not spent on challenging content is wasted. As I’m pvp focused, that means stuff like any form of pvp death penalties need to go, as does any sort of system that penalizes you for fighting lots of people, and easy/fast access to relatively equal foes(ie Arena or BGs) is an incredibly useful tool.
Devs seem to be unable to balance their games nowadays. They seem to balance for the worst, and nobody can be that dumb and bad except a few. There is usually a bell curve of skill and understanding, and if you aim for either extreme end you leave the huge majority disappointed.
I believe modern MMOs feature a culture where players feel bad and horrible if they do not succeed right way without even having to try harder at all.
I have high hopes for Guild Wars 2, but they also show how much they cater for this imagined superstupid customer: The death penalty is sitting down and throwing rocks till someone gives you the kiss of life. I do not want to be put in the “hardcore” corner, but I refuse to be called that because it is not true. We have just reached the other end of the bell curve nowadays and it just sucks.
Wolfshead called it the shallow kind of “fun”. It is very hard to get engaged or fall in love with shallow games… wait, somehow it seems to work… *takes a look at contemporary MMOs*. I wonder when this trend changes. “Easy to learn, hard to master” does not really exist nowadays. It simply can’t in shallow game systems. “Easy to learn, optional to master” seems to fit modern game design more.
Bad time for game devs – apparently the emperors aka the people who pay them and fund the projects go for the approval of the crowd. Better safe than sorry, and thus a change of this silly situation might take a very long time, unfortunately. Latest victims: GW2 despite all its merits has dumbed down some core elements of GW1 and SWTOR seems to be DIKU in Space: Reloaded. Or WoW 2.0.
To make things worse, single player MMOs nowadays seem to become like watching interactive movies. Just take a look how Dragon Age and Mass Effect evolved, soon we have more cutscenes than everything else together.
Wow. “Easy to learn, optional to master”
That simple phrase really hits the nail on the head for today’s MMOs.
Maybe my problem is I don’t care if there are scrubs in a game doing scrubby stuff. I don’t even care if they get rewarded for it really. I don’t care about the average player’s skill level. All I care about is challenging myself, it doesn’t matter to me if nobody else bothers to. “Easy to learn, optional to master” has some truth to it, I just don’t personally see the problem with it.
I care when there is no way to be rewarded for my skill.
Wouldn’t you care if PvP was basically 1% skill and 99% a roll of the dice? That’s pretty much what most MMO PvM/PvE has become.
Wouldn’t you care if scrubs doing scrubby stuff beat you 49% of the time?
I think you would.
Keep in mind that PvE is about 10 times more popular than PvP, even when PvP is done well.
Right, being rewarded for skill is the important thing. I don’t really care if scrubs get rewarded for not having skill too. If pve in in such a state that you can’t challenge yourself and be rewarded for it, then it definitely sucks.
By and large I always felt that for the most part…MMOs were a pale shadow compared to MUDs where risk vs reward and rewarding player skill were concerned. I can’t recall a single game out of the traditional themepark MMOs (including everquest) where being really good at your class would allow you to solo a boss that normally took three people, or tank for a group several levels higher (This was from playing on Threshold).
I stayed with MUDs and Neverwinter Nights through the “good old days” of MMOs. Back then both were pretty even on death penalties – reason I stayed with the older school/smaller games is that my skill at the game mattered more then the amount of time I was willing to do things like grind or camp raid bosses. I care about the overall “world experience”, PVP and mastering challenges to my skill…maximizing the numbers is nothing more then an annoying hurdle to me.
As for “sport PVP” games of the type Outsider mentions I enjoy these at times as well (Mainly Planetside, Age of Conan previously). But I find there’s something deeper missing from the experience – a sense of meaning I get out of higher consequence sandbox games.
That is what I miss as well Serith. Games where skill could make you better than larger groups, or higher level players.
In the modern MMO, a level or two trumps skill, and an extra 1 or 2 players always trumps skill. That sucks.
Never forget how healing classes automatically have higher numbers on their healing abilities (balanced for staving off more than one attacker, of course) and therefore overpower the others, as they have a massive advantage in the tug of war of attrition that is HP.
I refer to Guildwars combat as “Minkwars”, as the Mink is the unit all fighting succeeds or fails with, but the term has unfortunately not caught on. This has been my greatest failure in life.
In a little way this reminds me of the fitness industry. There didn’t use to be one – athletes would train with the barbell and run/perform sport specific conditioning, as these are the only things that can yield results in the long run. Then silly fads became all the rage, shallow lies telling people they don’t need to learn how to lift and can still get “results”. What these “results” might entail? My research of the science is these variations on mindless aerobics accomplishes the same thing as eating one (1) less potato chip a day.
Billy Banks didn’t get hyooge or kicked in the gut by guys half his size by waving his arms in the air like a tool, I’ll tell you what.
The key difference is the loot pinata game actually delivers some joy, while the fitnessdry just takes people’s money.
Also – I can’t be the only one who has like… dozens of design documents I never intend to produce an actual game of. Surely, there must be some kind of place online where people like this congregate?
A repository of design documents? I don’t know of one. Maybe you should start it!
I wrote an article a while back on how “challenge” and “risk” are different things. I have no use for a death penalty, but I like a good challenge. Penalties are just a time sink (and in a subscription model, that translates directly to paying cash for screwing up), but good challenging content can be plenty good fun, even if I have to tackle it several times to learn the skills necessary to conquer. Failure is the penalty, as far as I’m concerned, and my lack of skill is the factor goading me into trying again.
I’m all for crowd control (and more tactical combat) and boosting player skill (which is why I love the level-less Puzzle Pirates), but penalties and time sinks (including the vast majority of level and gear gating) just waste my time. No thanks.
So… if my time is spent developing skills I didn’t have, I’m OK. If it’s spent doing something I’ve already mastered but must repeat for some arbitrary gate or to satisfy a penalty, I log off. It’s busywork, plain and simple, and I hated it in school, when I wasn’t paying for the privilege of doing it.
Yeah, Tesh puts it better than I did. I agree with him 100%.
If you are walking a tightrope, the excitement doesn’t come from knowing that a fall is simply failure. The excitement comes from the fact that if you fall, it will likely (if not definitely) hurt very badly. That’s why death has to have a penalty.
As a player, you aren’t supposed to like it. Very often, players don’t know what is best for them. They say they don’t like this or that, but not liking something is very often IMPORTANT.
This is no different than really, really hating a villain in a tv show or book. If you liked everyone, that would be dull. The same is true for some, very specific, very carefully chosen game features. You aren’t supposed to like them, and the very fact that you don’t like them adds significant heightened awareness, excitement, and drama to whatever actions you are taking.
Also, I think people enjoy busywork more than they admit. Many hobbies that people enjoy immensely involve enormous amounts of busywork: gardening, crochet, golf, tennis, etc. I’m not saying busywork is always good, I am saying people need to be aware of the fact some of the things they demonize are actually more enjoyable than they may want to admit.
RE: excitement
That assumes that every player plays because they are a thrillseeker, which I don’t believe is entirely true. On some level everybody enjoys a bit of risk taking, but for many players such thrillseeking is not the primary goal of playing a game, and when such risks conflict with their primary goal for playing the game, they are right to reject them.
RE: busy work
I agree with you on this one, to a degree. I spent plenty of time in WoW on busy work(eg gathering), and had some fun with it. It’s good to have some brainless entertainment(I replaced my TV watching time with WoW pve) to relax and let the stress melt away. The problem arises when such busy work becomes a barrier to doing something else you’d rather be doing instead. Guild Wars is a great example of optional busy work. There are tonnes of cool looking armor sets and weapons you can grind your butt off to get, and lots of people do grind them out. However, these items are mechanically identical to what you’d be wearing by the time you finished the game’s main plotline anyways. I put a decent amount of grinding time into gearing up my character to look cool, and I didn’t mind it at all, as said grind was completely optional and didn’t act as a content barrier. More mmos need to take this route with their busywork/grind.