Exploring Levels Again: The Numbers

Getting back to the leveling discussion and the idea for an RPG without a level cap, I’m putting some numbers together just to see how they feel and to get an idea for the scope of a level range using WoW-style advancement. Let us make the following stipulations:

• We have a leveling system with no true cap.
• Characters and mobs both have levels.
• The XP needed to advance to a new level is calculated as a number of mob kills of a level equal to that of the character. This is how WoW does it, by the way, although of course in practice you have other factors such as rest XP, XP from quests and so on that will need to eventually be figured in.
• Mobs not at the character’s level will of course yield a different amount of XP, but that’s not important for the purposes of this particular calculation.
• The power curve, i. e. just how much a level means in mechanical effect, is not considered here. In a non-levelcapped system I suggest that the power curve be pretty gradual.

Okay, so given those things, we have a basic leveling calculation:

Where x is the number of XP needed to get to the next level, c is the character’s current level, e is the mathematical constant e (equal to approximately 2.718) and r is a scaling factor equal to the character’s level divided by 10 and rounded to one decimal place. Using this forumla some scaling could be done either by moving the constant up or down or adding some number (probably less than 1) to r.

Truncating the actual XP numbers and plugging in some sample figures, wee see that a level 1 character needs 70 XP to reach level 2, while a level 11 character needs 21,890 XP to reach level 12, or 73,790 accumulated total XP. This works out to over a thousand mobs killed. I’ve calculated this up to level 100 (not a cap, just as high as I have taken the numbers) and it seems likely that very, very few players would surpass level 40, which requires you to have gained the equivalent of over 100K worth of at-level mob kills.

Now, as I said before, you would almost certainly have quests as a means to get XP, and those would yield as much XP as a batch of mobs. Plus there might be XP gain rate boosts of some kind, or XP from crafting, exploration, gathering and so forth. So it might not be as slow in practice as these numbers suggest, but hitting level 20 would be something. If the power curve is indeed gradual and as steep as I suggest, you could tailor quests to target a range of, say, seven levels, and have a lot of overlap within the level ranges in which players will tend to cluster, therefore reducing the need for the same kinds of content in multiple level ranges.

On the other hand, many players under such a scheme might feel, say, in the 20s or even the teens that it takes forever to level. So maybe there is some kind of sub-level advancement a la DDO or Vanguard, where you get your benefits for the next level during that level as opposed to only when you hit it. If the net power gain per level in +5%, for example (it’s probably impossible to quantify this so precisely, but there ought to be some kind of target to shoot at,) you might get +1% at 20% of the next level, another +1% at 40% and so on. You might also want level-independent intangibles (reputation might be one example) that players could go for as measures of accomplishment.

Would crafting be dependent on this overall character level? I’m not sure, but my inclination is to say that it would… but there’s also my other notion that level is supposed to be the result of power advancement rather than the cause. In an arrangement like that, a more complicated progression formula would be in order, probably one based on skill ratings. But I’m not sure you’d need to implement both ideas, actually.

The Vanilla Dream

In a sense, playing MMOs impairs our judgement. We can’t stand back and be impartial anymore, judging from on high. We can look back to the Elder Days but our vision is clouded by the fog of years and the memories of many, many man-hours in the trenches. Sometimes it takes an outsider to come in, look around and say something that makes everybody blink.

I started playing World of Warcraft around July of 2007. This was well into the Burning Crusade era, but other than starting Draenei or Blood Elf characters, I wouldn’t touch any of the expansion’s real meat for a long while yet. Changes were afoot then; the game was shifting under players’ feet even if they weren’t noticing. The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj had been opened long ago. XP rates had been accelerated and content gaps had been methodically filled in. Mechanical burdens on certain classes were being eased. Autoloot became available and quest trackers were starting to help lead players through the content. Even at low levels better gear became available in the starter zones, and thus in the auction house, and crafting was never retuned… and still hasn’t been to this day, making most crafting done below the tradeskill cap useless.

Even aside from the total revamp of level 1-60 content that Catacylsm brought, WoW has changed very substantially since it launched. Thousands of little things have changed, some called nerfs and others buffs, and some good and some bad, but the aggregate effect has been to make most gameplay easier and the world feel more programmed and structured. “Over-Managed” is, I think, the best way to put it. The game’s story is now Blizzard’s story rather than the story filled in by your imagination between pieces of Blizzard content.

It used to be that if you played on a PvP server you could only make characters of one faction or the other; you couldn’t have both Horde and Alliance on that server. By the time Blizzard lifted this restriction, almost nobody complained — because open-world PvP aside from the occasional random gank had almost completely ceased already. Blizzard had begun to gently herd PvP-oriented players into instanced battlegrounds and arenas where the gameplay could be more carefully controlled.

This process was already underway when I started in mid-2007. If I say that I think WoW was a more compelling game then than it is now, it would be tempting to call it nostalgia, and to be honest it would be hard to convince even myself that nostalgia wasn’t a factor; I’d just be nostalgic for mid-2007 or thereabouts instead of late 2005 or whatever.

Without any of this explicitly in mind I re-installed the WoW client a couple of weeks ago and fired up a trial (the so-called “starter edition”) account that I’ve had for some time now. I started playing a number of different characters including the new Pandaren, the slightly less new Goblin and the old-but-revamped Tauren. I didn’t break level 7 in any of these examples, and the whole process felt not just uncompelling but actually distasteful. A lot of good things have been brought to WoW over the years but it seems that a lot has been lost, and the direction, at least, of that chain of events is very clear. But is that just nostalgia talking? Do I just remember the Azeroth of 2007 fondly because those were the early days of my MMO hobby?

Maybe it’s possible to get an answer to this question; there’s been some talk of late in the MMO blogosphere about a project called Emerald Dream, a WoW ‘private server’ that replicates the state of the game in late 2006, before Burning Crusade patches started to hit, a time when the launch problems were straightened out but before the first of the major direction shifts away from the open world had taken place.

Now, I think there are reasons to be leery of the private server business. For one, it’s a murky gray legal area at best; basically at any point the Blizzard boot might come down and the server could be shut down. In this particular case the people responsible aren’t making any money from it (and don’t even appear to be taking donations as far as I can tell,) but they aren’t going to quite the same lengths as, say, some of the pre-NGE SWG “emulators” to insulate themselves against potential legal action by requiring you to obtain your own properly dated version of the client. Blizzard has come down hard in the past on people who were trying to make money off of private servers, but (apparently) not-for-profit private servers appear to be very abundant and not at all hard to find. It seems unlikely to me that Blizzard doesn’t know about them, and yet some appear to have been running for years.

Too, there are (admittedly interesting) technical challenges faced by a team running a private server without access to the actual server code; from my understanding the server-side part of the game is basically recreated from scratch by deciphering the packets sent out by the client. I’m not sure where the Emerald Dream folks are with this, but in the presumably similar cases of pre-NGE SWG projects, there’s a whole lot of stuff that’s not working yet.

I’m not being coy in saying that I have never played on a private server and have generally stayed well clear of the whole slightly sordid (at best) business. Yet I have been tempted twice; in both cases not by games that I played years ago but by games I missed in their heyday: Pre-NGE Star Wars Galaxies and now Vanilla WoW. I was also tempted by and did indeed play on EQ’s “throwback” Fippy Darkpaw server, but that effort is not a true (or even really close) emulation of the classic game; rather, it is the modern game with some superficial changes made to it to make it look more like EQ as it was back then. Imagine a “vanilla” WoW server that took out flying mounts and expansion content, capped levels at 60 and maybe turned the XP gain rate down a bit, but was otherwise the same as the modern game — that’s basically what Fippy Darkpaw is. Nevertheless, this wasn’t why it didn’t work for me. With no nostalgic connection to the EQ of old or indeed much affection for the current game it has evolved into, I simply couldn’t overcome the sheer datedness of the whole thing, and I abandoned it after a couple of hours.

On the other hand, Fippy is run by SOE and is therefore far less troublesome to me. If Blizzard were to offer even a slapdash vanilla server or two I’m quite sure that they’d be boiling over with population and that lapsed people would resubscribe to play on them; the demand for such might be enough to keep a smaller MMO or two afloat. But it’s likely seen as a play for chump change by Blizzard, and the effort of setting such a server up is not trivial; if you think it is, then I would gently suggest that you have no idea what you are talking about. So I think that any official effort in this direction is very unlikely for the foreseeable future, although I can think of a couple of creative ways in which it might be done with official sanction from Blizzard.

Wilhelm floated the idea of subscribing to WoW but choosing to play on Emerald Dream instead; this would put a player in the ethical clear but perhaps not the legal one. On the other hand, if Blizzard were to offer some kind of classic or vanilla server then I would be strongly tempted to check that out, and I would feel a whole lot more comfortable with that.

Levels Reassembled

Levels have an important function and heritage in RPGs. They are a feature disliked by many and dismissed without understanding the reasons why they are looked on favorably, and without articulating why they are objectionable. The use of level as a measure of character power harkens back to Dungeons & Dragons, of course, from which all RPGs in whatever media ultimately spring. Even early on, however, there were games that did not feature them — 1977′s Traveller and Chaosium’s RuneQuest spring immediately to mind — and their use or disuse has driven many a controversy and feud over the decandes.

Detractors say that a level-based game makes certain assumptions about the nature of starting characters that might be undesirable; if you try to model Elric in D&D at first level, for example, he’s going to not only be very weak, but a key element of his character is neccesarily going to be absent. Thus too with Conan, the Gray Mouser, Gandalf and other classic fantasy characters. Similar characters built in systems without levels might be no more powerful but at least the conceptual barrier of making such a character “at 1st level” is torn down.

Proponents of levels point out that they provide a balancing mechanism which can be handy if implemented well, and that they provide convenient achievement benchmarks to feed players’ sense of accomplishment. And when we start talking about fantasy RPGs in particular, it’s hard to dispute that, no doubt at least in part due to the example and expectations set by D&D, the game just doesn’t feel right without some kind of ordinal advancement ranking. Level-less FRPGs have historically gained very little traction in the tabletop marketplace unless they are very specialized, like White Wolf’s Exalted — and even that has indirect leveling in the form of the Essence characteristic, which has a heavy effect on overall character power and tends to be increased in a fairly predictable way by players.

I’ll stipulate that fantasy games ought to have levels in some form, but not necessarily in the form proferred by D&D, while games in science fiction and other genres can get away without them, and may in fact be better off doing so. But let’s break that down and take apart where levels really come from.

In the D&D model, shared by numerous tabletop games and virtually all fantasy video game RPGs, you get some kind of currency as you play, typically called “experience,” and when you’ve built up enough, you level up. This brings with it some concrete benefits that increase the character’s power; more and better abilities, additional endurance currencies such as hit points or mana and increased success chances are all typical. There are also less quantifiable benefits, in that you can accomplish things at a higher level that you couldn’t at a lower level, and have added a pip to the Brag-O-Meter.

The actual specific mechanism of advancement and the benefits of additional levels aren’t important here, and of course there are also achievement metrics like money or reputation that exist strictly outside of the leveling ladder, the value of which varies from game to game. But then you have the offbeat example of the Elder Scrolls series, in which leveling is an elective process that you can in principle skip, as indeed in Oblivion you were indirectly encouraged to do. But for that very reason the series provides an interesting example, in that some metrics directly relevant to character power are tied to level, but not all of them are.

I do not think there is any a priori reason why one could not extend this idea to its logical conclusion by making levels irrelevant to character power at all, as Lethality suggested in a comment on the last post. But that displaces one of the primary reasons for having levels at all, as mentioned in the proponent’s argument above, as useful method for the game or the game master to judge character power for balance purposes.

However, a different approach might be to make levels the result rather than the cause of character power. You don’t level to improve your abilities, you level because you improved your abilities. This is sort of how things work in Skyrim, for example, but in that game there a number of things that still increase or are attained because of level, namely health/mana/stamina and perks, and those have a large tangible impact. In the mechanism I’m talking about you would have some kind of formula based on total skills or average skills or wharever, possibly with some other factors involved as well, and when that calculated figure hits a certai point, you level to a fanfare or back-slaps or something. (I’m especially fond of the White Tree animation you get when hitting certain levels in LotRO.)

One could in principle graft this kind of system onto any level-less game like Burning Wheel or GURPS or whatever, but you would need to mechanize it very carefully to minimize ways in which you could increase your character’s power without also increasing the challenge-increasing metric of level. This is exactly what occurred as the result of a halfhearted implementation in Oblivion, for example. You might also want to hide the details of the calculation from the players, or possibly include some randomizing factors that would vary leveling time by some degree. This all sounds like a big pain in the bookkeeping ass for a tabletop RPG, but a programmed or program-assisted game could do it for you.

This is, I think, part of one potential solution to the problems common to many RPGs, MMOs that suffer from the additional hindrance of finite content in particular. I’m hashing out ideas here rather than writing a manifesto, though, so if you have feedback to offer, I’d love to hear it.

Mists of Pandaria Cinematic Trailer Hits, Deemed Irrelevant

As of today the Mists of Pandaria cinematic trailer is up for perusal on YouTube. As such things go (I like to try to judge these things as short films in their own right,) it’s very nicely done. But I doubt it will change anyone’s mind.

WoW is starting to slide in a big way, losing another million players last quarter alone, and the launch of Guild Wars 2 in under two weeks is going to hurt it some more. But not permanently, I think — many of WoW’s players will dutifully return to check the expansion out. The real issue is Blizzard’s own complacency that has slowly chipped away at player confidence and enthusiasm; the content updates for a game which is starved for new content designed to be digested by players in mere days come less and less frequently, and the expansions have gotten less and less ambitious even while they really didn’t add much to gameplay and while other gameplay elements have gradually been backed out of the game. It’s a leaner, shallower game than the game that put Blizzard on top of this market in the first place. I can’t see any alternative to the notion that this is a game on the verge of life support, with Blizzard trying to squeeze out maximal revenue for minimal investment while the party lasts. That’s a valid strategy from a business standpoint, but it’s clear that Blizzard doesn’t believe in this product any more.

As for me, I have a vague intention of checking the expansion out at some point, but certainly not when it launches at full price — and given how historically sluggish Blizzard has been at lowering the price of aging products, I’m not motivated to do so any time soon… maybe next summer or something. But given how fast the market is evolving, with almost everything no longer requiring a subscription, and with numerous entries even within the same fantasy themepark niche offering more features, greater depth and in some cases comparable polish, I can’t see any reason to do more than step in for a month or so. For different reasons, games like Rift and EVE Online are more attractive for a subscription price, and titles like GW2, LotRO, EverQuest2 and Vanguard offer more for (potentially) less money. Even The Secret World at least offers novelty when compared against a contracting game that we have probably all played more than enough of, and to which nothing really new or appealing is being added with this expansion. Unless you have a thing for Pandas in particular.

A Rift Too Far

Since Trion and Raptr were kind enough to provide me with a retail code for Rift, it’s been my more-or-less main game this week. A lot of others have come back as well in the wake of the announcement of a very substantial-sounding expansion.

Having played through all of Silverwood back in the beta before opting to pass on the game, I chose to go the Defiant route this time. The game is about as good as it was back in beta — meaning very well-done. The rift events seem better tuned and the pet and mob pathing seems less flaky, and there’s some quests and stuff that appear to be new. And you no longer have to unlock souls — you have your pick from all those available to your Calling (archetype) from the get-go. I’m not sure how you get PvP souls now, but I’ve no inkling that that’s changed.

And Trion has done a great job supporting Rift over the sixteen months since its release — such a good job, in fact, that even SynCaine, that whirlpool of scorn for all things WoW-like, has expressed his admiration for Trion’s management of the property.

I’m now level 21 and well into the second Defiant zone, Stonefield. I’m playing a Mage centered on the Pyromancer soul and am very happy with the way the character plays. Despite that, I am probably only good for another ten levels or so; I’d like to see the next couple of zones, but unless they somehow blow me away I will not be plunking down the $15 to keep playing, and indeed will probably have lost interest before the 30 days are up — as I predicted would happen before launch and which was my big reason for not buying the game in the first place.

I once wrote a post about Warhammer Online not having a soul. By that I meant that it was a sterile, by the numbers design which while well-executed in some ways ultimately lacked the creative spirit that belongs in an MMO. It played like a game and not a world. There’s a lot of titles out there like that now, and a big one (WoW) that has moved farther and farther in that direction as time has gone on. Rift is another. In fact, as I have pointed out in the recent Ardwulf Presents, Rift plays a lot like Warhammer Online, except that everything actually works. That it does is to Trion’s great credit, but ultimately there is a “something” missing despite the game clearly firing on all cylinders. It’s a terrific game in so many ways and the upcoming expansion sounds like gangbusters, and I went out of my way to start a trial even (just) before the Raptr giveaway — and I’m glad to be able to try it out without the level 20 cap and whatever other limits are on trial accounts. Yet I am strongly disinclined — at this point and I don’t see the next ten levels and two zones changing this — toward paying a subscription fee for it.

This isn’t just a resistance to subscriptions in the face of a field increasingly dominated by free to play titles, either. I’ve been paying monthly for Vanguard for a while now and just upped that to a three-month SOE All Access pass for a summer (hopefully) loaded with Vanguard and EQ2 and maybe even a whirl in Planetside since the sequel is looking more impressive every day. Would I play it if it were fully free to play, inasmuch as much games are? Yeah, probably. In fact, while I respect Trion’s decision to go all in on the sub model, in this respect it’s a game I would compare not to WAR but to LotRO, which was a title I couldn’t stick to until it switched over, and have since spent a couple of hundred hours in. And LotRO is in many ways not as well-designed as Rift. In basic handling and combat feel it’s not even close. But soul… now that it’s got.

I figure by the end of next week I’ll be done. And there’s probably another video ahead where I talk about this and relate it to some other factors and other games.

The Road Ahead: 2012 in MMOs

An end is come to 2011, and it was, shall we say, not a banner year for MMOs. The year saw two successful launches of games mired in their lack of ambition, and the rest of the year was older games doing interesting things like going free to play or launching nostalgia servers. Still, as we say in Cleveland, “there’s always next year.” Which is now. So what’s on the horizon for the next twelve months (minus a couple of weeks,) and how will current market entries evolve? Here are my (only slightly late) predictions.

As far as I can see, the only “triple-A” title with a real chance to shake things up in a big way is Guild Wars 2. Even if it doesn’t come through with everything it’s promised, it’s going to make the year’s big splash, with top-notch production quality and a stated desire to abandon some of the hobby’s most pernicious leftovers from the EverQuest days. Holy Trinity, this means you. The move toward dynamic world events rather than static quests may provide a sense of non-linearity. On the other hand, I worry about the cohesion of its world and the side systems that are so important to fleshing out an MMO, like crafting. And the semi-static cutscenes, while artfully done from what I’ve seen, may subtract from immersion and sense of place. There’s also the technological element that I tend not to favor in a fantasy game, and the inevitable cutsey race, but I intend to do my best to live with those.

A game that will have less impact but which may be just as innovative is Funcom’s The Secret World. It ought to be graphically top-notch, if system-crushing. It’s going to fill the modern supernatural niche that’s been underserved by MMOs up to this point, and also promises to depart significantly from established tropes. It’s scheduled to launch in April, but my guess is that it’ll be pushed back to July. The big fear with this one is that, as they did with Age of Conan, Funcom will mis-target the game and end up courting the wrong bunch of players. But hopefully they’ll have learned a lesson from AoC’s troubled evolution and the marketing and community folks will be rowing the same boat as the developers this time.

Not likely to shake things up at all is Mists of Pandaria. More of the same, yawn. Blizzard has unquestionably left the era in which they can do no wrong, and their Big Dog will continue to shed subscribers, but by late in the year — November or December — Mists will cast off, and WoW will still be on the top of the heap. Expect a formal announcement of whatever Titan turns out to be at Blizzcon.

I’m now thinking that my earlier prediction for Star Wars: The Old Rebublic — 2-3 million subscribers at peak and 500K six months later — is going to bust. I now think it will peak substantially lower — say a million and a half — but that it will hold on to the players it has much better than recent history would suggest. Whether it’s actually a profitable enterprise for EA is likely to remain murky, no matter how many people are playing it. Don’t be shocked to see it holding on to a million subs by the end of the year… but we’d better see some substantive update/expansion news by then, too, or we’ll see it start to peter out after that. The slow rollout of new content is poised to hurt SWTOR more than other titles because it’s likely to be even slower than usual.

I predict that TERA will be the next Mortal Online – mildly hyped before launch and sinking like a stone after. But I could be wrong, and if the game pulls off the action-style combat at its heart it could do better than I expect. TERA is going to live or die by two things: how well the combat plays, and how well the combat plays one-handed, if you catch my drift.

WildStar looks promising, if conventional, but I don’t think we know enough about it to dismiss it just yet. It’s coming out of the NCSoft House of Winners, so my expectations are low, but it’s not being developed by NCSoft, so there’s a chance it will turn into something palatable. Its visual style, though, sings “WoW Clone,” and many might not be able to get past that even if it varies from bog-standard more than expected. I think it will release in Q4 of 2012.

Dust 514, the ground-based counterpart of EVE Online should finally launch in 2012. It had better — Microsoft and Sony are gearing up for the debut of the next generation of consoles, and this year is likely to be the last chance for titles to make a big splash before people start looking more at the new round of hardware than the current one. I predict modest — very modest — success on this one; it’ll be hobbled both by CCP’s lack of cred in the shooter marketplace and by its exclusivity on the lagging PS3. God only knows how clean it will launch, but nobody is better than CCP at shepherding a title through a modest debut and into long-term growth. Expect to start hearing about a PC port around the end of the year.

Speaking of CCP, we may or may not hear anything new on World of Darkness Online. It’s not shelved, exactly, but expect the focus for the year to be on EVE and Dust. Next year I think we’ll start to hear some serious noise about this title.

Warhammer 40K: Dark Millennium will not launch in 2012.

Neverwinter is a wildcard. Like TERA, it’s supposed to be action-oriented, but my hopes are not high for it in this department. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to seeing it. I’m predicting a Q3 launch.

Korean entry ArcheAge has all the hallmarks of a Vanguard — big promises, low quality control and a lead developer past his prime. No other game manages to look so promising yet elicit so many utterances of “really?” Open world, super-detailed crafting and construction, mass battles on land and sea… and player run jails and other harebrained-sounding stuff make me excited yet extremely leery. It may release in 2012 — I think it will — but my guess is that a North American release is months behind the Korean launch, maybe into 2013.

Less worrying is The Repopulation, despite its awful title. With early talk centering around the influence of Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online, it’s not likely to be a massive hit, but it’s got a chance to shake the hobby out of its torpor. I expect a launch in 2013 at the earliest. It’s one to keep an eye on.

Planetside 2 will launch in 2012 with major problems and withering scorn in the blogosphere, but will be a modest success for all that. “Modest success” is the best SOE is going to manage for the moment… but they have a big opportunity to do something special with EverQuest Next. Let’s hope they don’t blow it, but in any event I expect to hear only token news about it in 2012.

Vanguard will still be running as of the end of the year. I hope to see a freemium move, but SOE appears to not be considering that for the moment. I should finally see some long-awaiting development and new content, which may boost its (currently dire) numbers.

The most promising-sounding thing in development is Pathfinder Online. Goblinworks seems to be telling me all the right things… start small, don’t spend a gazillion dollars, don’t plan for more players than you have even the remotest chance to get or keep, and create a realistically-scaled sandbox world. But it’s really early, and I’m not even convinced that the project will materialize at all. These guys are really new and untested, so I think they’ll either bring a number of fresh ideas to the table and actually advance the state of the art, or evaporate before accomplishing much of anything. I’m rooting for them.

Among older games, EverQuest II, LotRO and City of Heroes will keep on trucking under their new freemium models. EverQuest will continue to endure, but I think we’ll see another historic sunset some time during the year. My guess would be Dark Age of Camelot, but Warhammer Online is very, very vulnerable, especially with a companion game (Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes) that takes the fun(ish) part from WAR and makes it a game of its own. Bioware/Mythic may also decide to tighten their business up if they’re taking to big a bath on SWTOR, the basket all their eggs are laid in, so Ultima Online could fall here as well.

We’re going to start to see the many entries in the freemium MMO marketplace shake out into tiers. This has already started, but it’ll become more apparent in 2012. The biggest player in the freemium market is going to continue to be LotRO unless something very dramatic happens, but APB is giving it a good run for its money right now, and Star Trek Online has a shot at landing in the top bunch if it can hold together.

We’ll see in a year how I did.

Idle Time and Idle Mind

In a way, I am deeply unhappy with Skyrim because it has so dominated the part of my head that deals with gaming. I have a lot of other prospects to play, but I’m having trouble getting into anything else… so, of course, what time I have had to play has pretty much stayed in Skyrim.

This week we have Star Trek Online going free to play at last, and I’m planning to give that a whirl. Meanwhile, I have been dabbling a bit in Wurm Online, which is (graphics aside) the closest thing to Skyrim in the MMO world, even surpassing its immersability in many respects. (Nota bene: Wurm is not much like Skyrim at all, and I’m only comparing the two in terms of immersion. Gameplay-wise it’s a lot closer to Minecraft.) Still, I’m finding it best in small doses.

On something of a lark, I installed League of Legends and took that out for a spin. As I’d predicted, it’s not for me. I also reinstalled World of Warcraft with the thought of using my long-idle trial account on their new “free” plan, and played close to ten minutes of that before realizing that it’s just too stale these days. I will say, though, that Blizzard has done a fine job of making the download and install a great deal less painful than it used to be, so that’s something.

WoW’s linearity these days seems to be the deal-breaker for me, which even Blizzard seems to be recognizing. Unfortunately, this comes after the complete revamp of Old Azeroth into Linear Land that Cataclysm brought. It’s good in a way, because I will be less tempted to dabble in a game I now regard as permanently spoiled.

At any rate, I find myself at something of a loss. I have installed and could readily play LotRO, Champions, DDO, APB, Fallen Earth or EQ2, and that’s just the MMOs. Yet my desire to play any of them is at an all-time low. Perhaps it’s time to unearth a long-fallow tabletop project.

Why Play MMOs?

Games, even just video games, are varied. There are lots of different kinds available from the preposterously fantastic to the incredibly realistic, from the casual to the hardcore, from brain-rottingly easy to the extremely challenging, and in a diverse array of genres. So what is it about MMOs in particular that interests us in them? What drew us in at the start, and what keeps us around?

Having done a lot of reflection on the subject both over the last few years and recently in the wave of Skyrim, I think the basic appeal of the MMO is threefold.

First of all, you have the big nominal selling point for many, especially among the commentator set, in that in an MMO you’re playing with other people, often “friends” of some description. Yet most MMO players (but not necessarily most commentators) play mostly or exclusively solo, either be preference or due to problems getting together with the same bunch on a regular schedule. Surely, the presence of other players is appealing to some, but just as often other players in the game can be a distraction or an annoyance. In quasi-MMOs like Guild Wars or multiplayer Diablo their presence is entirely optional, such that you don’t even have to notice them if you don’t want to. It’s my thought that the presence of other players, no matter that it may be very important to some folks, is a secondary concern, and the other two factors don’t rely on it.

Second, you have immersiveness. Many different types of games can be immersive, while others don’t even try, but almost anything calling itself an MMO, as well as a few examples that fit only marginally into the category, at least make a passing attempt at it. Some level of immersiveness is a commonality among MMOs. To me, the social part of the game, while attractive, is less important than this, but the two factors are unalike in that nobody plays a game becuase it’s not immersive, but plenty of people play multiplayer games because they are profoundly antisocial. For some it’s a social outlet that they find they can manage, while for others it’s an outlet for their antisocial tendencies. This last type of verminous individual has an impact beyond its numbers.

Third is the open-ended nature of the MMO. Few examples are really open-ended in truth, but they can seem so in practice, because some players will simply never exhaust the finite content, or never get bored with the repeatable content. You can, if you want, play regularly for years and never see the same stuff, or just deal with it. There’s a sense of progression, but you have that in many kinds of games, not just RPGs, let alone MMORPGs. In an MMO, though, you should ideally not very often feel that you’ve reached the end of the line as you would in a game like Dragon Age… and if you do, you may quit or at least put the game aside for a while until there is something new to do. This is the one that gets mentioned the least, but is perhaps the most important. How many folks do we know who left an MMO because they felt that they’d done all they wanted to do in it?

This last is also where the World of Warcraft formula, of easy advancement made even faster and more trivial over time, starts to look counterproductive. It’s a good thing for a game to be accessible, as WoW is, yet it burns players out faster, too. Lost in the fact that WoW has more players than other MMOs is the related fact that more people leave it, too, and I would bet that happens at a higher rate. It’s an easy jump to thinking that, for example, EVE players, in a more open-ended game with a steadier advancement pace, might be by and large more loyal to it.

This calculus also says something about why Skyrim has, by and large, been so immensely appealing to MMO gamers in particular, and why it took over the MMO blogosphere to such a great extent before players were wrenched away by the must-play SWTOR… and why some didn’t make the jump, despite all the hullabaloo. It’s an immersive and open-ended game that happens to lack an MMO’s social multiplayer aspect. Not that there aren’t other factors, of course, but this is one of them.

Game Hours Tracking

As a gamer, do you use one of the various tracking clients, and if so, how much attention do you pay to your numbers?

I’ve developed the somewhat anal-retentive habit of keeping track of hours played. Originally I did this using XFire, but when that got bought by gold selling scum I dropped it and switched to Raptr, which thoughtfully imported all my Xfire data. I don’t pretend that it’s completely accurate – Raptr, for example, does not report Vanguard, and I have never gotten it to successfully recognize Minecraft, either. And equally certainly, not all of my hours get reported even when Raptr happens to be running; it occasionally logs me out, for example, and sometimes numbers add up funnily.

Still, those numbers are interesting to look at. According to Raptr, I’ve played more World of Warcraft than anything else. This is almost certainly true, but those hours were accumulated over a period in which I had a lot of time to play and seemingly reported every minute of it. I would say Team Fortress 2 is probably number 2 in actuality, but neither Steam never seemed to track my hours correctly at the time, and I haven’t played much of it since I started using Raptr.

Amusingly, Warhammer Online was #2 on the list for a long time, and at the height of my disgust with it I was sort of working to get it out of the top 5 by playing other games. Not in any organized way (or it would have happened quicker than it did,) but it was in the back of my mind. EverQuest II took over my #2 spot just recently. It’s now 40+ hours over EVE Online at #3 and likely to stay in that spot even when I return to EVE eventually. If you also count my tracked hours in EQ2X (14, which is a lot less than I actually spent playing it,) it’s still number 2.

What MMOs can Learn From Skyrim

Yesterday’s post garnered some interesting responses both here and on G+. Several pointed out that MMOs do contain a gameplay element that cannot be satisfied in single-player games. This is quite correct, but not particularly applicable to my own situation, where it’s not strictly an issue of not having the hours to play but of an irregular schedule. I would have to win the guild lottery to find a group that fits with my itinerary.

Also, so I’m being crystal clear here, single-player sandboxes, Skyrim included, have a number of fairly predictable flaws. A search on YouTube for something like “Oblivion goofs” will reveal some of the many glitches from that game, and Skyrim shares that in addition to having a UI that’s (implausibly) worse in many ways. Opening up options and increasing a world’s interactability also increases situations that weren’t forseen by either the developers or the code. This tends to result in a game that is, as Tobold points out, in a game that’s easier to break than your average MMO.

This is so because MMOs, to a far greater extent than single-player games, see ongoing development where such oddities and balance problems get smoothed over. In this process the openness of a Skyrim would inevitably be lost. Ported as-is, it would make a very sloppy MMO.

Still, there are lessons that MMO developers could learn from Skyrim and the Elder Scrolls series in general. Just off the top of my head, World of Warcraft has chairs that you can sit in, for example – most MMOs don’t. It’s a tiny thing that makes the world more interactable. What else might be done, even in the context of WoW?

A decent crafting system would be a good start. One of the more popular starting areas is a forest, for example – what if there was a lumberjacking harvesting ability and a tradeskill you could use lumber for, and you made trees – every tree, mind you – interactable? Well, obviously a lot of areas would be promptly deforested! But there are ways around this. You might have a (possibly repeatable) quest for the Arbor Society of Azeroth, where you’re given a packet of seeds and asked to replant them across the zone. Or the tress could be coded to regrow naturally over a period of time. You might want to make a forest zone bigger to compensate, but I don’t think bigger zones is a bad things – and fast or instantaneous travel is considered a necessity these days anyway.

Weather is another thing that increases interactability and immersion. What if there were ruins out in a desert that were covered up by rolling sands most of the time, and only occasionally revealed when the winds were right (i. e. at intervals not easily predictable)? What if, in truly appalling weather like we have here in Ohio, you took exposure damage unless you were in shelter or had some level of magical protection?

You can see that we’re swiftly moving away from something like WoW, despite its nice little touch of having chairs you can sit in. As we can come up with these ideas, we move farther and farther into that territory, and the game we imagine gets bigger and bigger. I’m tired of small games, and the most hard-beaten path of MMO development is leading to smaller and smaller.

Skyrim is a big game, and I’m not talking about the size of the landmass, which is incidental. Weather has a real effect on gameplay (without doing damage, normally,) and there are even abilities that let you control it. I can sit in the chairs and pick up the items on the table. Every single person in the game can be talked to or stolen from, most can be killed and they have actual behavior. When I showed up at the Jarl’s hall in Whiterun early one morning, the Jarl and all of his coterie were sitting around the table eating breakfast. I know these procedural behaviors break down from time to time and cause things that may be amusing or frustrating in equal measure, but they also grant the game a depth that is simply not present in any MMO I’m aware of.