Aug 20 2008
The dumbing down of gaming. MUDs, MMORPGs, Virtual Worlds getting easier by the second.
A very disturbing trend in the MUD, MMORPG, Virtual World marketplace is the steady dumbing down of gameplay that doesn’t show signs of stopping. With each new generation of games, they get easier and easier and are more about pure time investment than skill.
Meaningless Death, Excessive Quest driven advancement, Rapid Advancement Speed, and Hyper Specialization are all areas where the dumbing down of online games has really gotten out of control. I’ll talk about each of those things in this article.
Death, Where is Thy Sting?
In the early days of MUDs, death had serious consequences. The most common death penalty was losing half of your experience points. Not half of your current exp, and not half of your exp towards your next level - half of ALL experience ever earned. Leveling down multiple levels was not unheard of.
Then the Ultima Online, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot crowd came along, and death still had some sting but it was dramatically reduced. In DAoC you lost about a “bubble” (1/10th) of your exp needed for next level assuming you ran back to where you died and clicked on your tombstone. I don’t know the exact details of EQ death, but I know various resurrection spells reduced the xp loss, thought you often had to do a “corpse run” for your gear. Suffice it to say, death mattered. People cared about it. You couldn’t just screw around and die every 5 or 10 minutes for kicks or for quick transport.
Threshold ’s death penalty was considered tame at the time of release (lose 1 player level, 1 guild level, and current exp). It has been reduced many times over the last 12+ years (now you lose 1 player level and current exp, but there are tons of situations that can reduce that) but people still feel it is extremely harsh and extreme. In Primordiax , we are planning to go with an exp debt system to hopefully maintain SOME sense of loss without people dealing with an actual level down scenario. As a developer, it is very hard in the current MMORPG climate to make death mean something without driving off your players.
Go and tell your master that we have been charged by God with a sacred quest. If he will give us food and shelter for the night, he can join us in our quest for the Holy Grail.
Then there is the super heavy quest driven advancement systems popularized by WoW and continued by AoC. This method of leveling up requires almost zero skill at all. You don’t have to figure out ways to efficiently fight mobs at the highest possible challenge. You don’t have to figure out good places to fight. You don’t have to find good pull spots that are safe from surprise patrols. You just gather up a boat load of quests, open your map, and run around to the little glowing dots on your map. For the most part, you don’t even have to think. You certainly don’t have to read the quest descriptions (and I’d advise against it, as that not only slows you down but drains IQ points from the usually poor writing). You just run all over the map, most of the time doing NOTHING but watching your avatar run, click on various quest NPCs, occasionally kill a few mobs, and every now and then click on a glowie.
Quest driven advancement also lends itself to web sites and wikis that tell you EXACTLY what to do including the exact coordinates. There are companies right now making “widget” programs that allow you to access your browser IN GAME so you don’t even have to alt-tab out to look up a quest location. It is getting to the point where I wonder why people even bother playing MMOs and leveling up. The process is getting so automated and hand fed that I fail to see what the challenge is any more.
Please note that I am not bagging on the idea of games having a lot of quests for people to do. I love the idea of games having alternate types of game play. But the anti-grinding movement has gotten so strong that kill-grinding has been replaced by quest-grinding. And the sad thing is quest-grinding takes even less skill!
I wish to be an all powerful genie! Yes! Yes! The power! The absolute power!
Then there is advancement speed. In the old days of MUDs, gaining a level every few weeks or months was pretty solid. UO was very different as far as advancement, so I won’t really go there. But in EQ and DAoC, it generally took people a year or more to hit cap. A cap level character generally means you actually had to know your class, know how to play, know how to use the game’s mechanics to its full, etc. But in the modern crop of MMOs, people can hit cap in HOURS or DAYS. My god. What is the point of even having levels at all if people just hit the cap within such a short period of time?
The real tragedy of this phenomenon is it creates the obsession with an “end game.” I have said it before, but I hate the fact that this has become synonymous with the “real game.” Every MUD that comes out now almost immediately prompts the question “But what’s the end game?” Players barely enjoy the game itself because they are in such a rush to get what they feel is the real part of the game. This is totally out of whack. The whole game should be enjoyable. There should be so many things to do that people can have fun at any level. If you design your game to be a 19th century land rush to get to the end, you have failed utterly as a designer.
Hyper Specialization (Sorry, I’m a blog writing specialist now. I don’t find pictures. I don’t write witty headlines.)
This one probably surprises some of you. But I do indeed see this as part of the dumbing down of games. Character roles are getting so rigidly defined that players rarely have to think about what they are doing. If they are a tank, that’s all they do: tank. They generate as much threat as possible, and that’s basically it. Damage mitigation is the other main role of a tank, but most (not all, admittedly) of that is handled in advance through gear selection, character building, and buffs. Healers do one thing: they heal (this includes curing… but it is funny that in this day and age that seems like a whole separate discipline). DPS deals damage. And that’s basically it. This gets even worse in modern style raids, where players’ jobs get even more winnowed down and specialized, but we already have two raid discussions going right now so I won’t go down that path again here.
There was a time where tanking was mostly about skill and less about your class. Sure, some classes were better at it, but this was not an absolute. In DAoC (Midgard side, since that is what I know best), warriors were the best tanks, but berserkers, thanes, and skalds could all tank pretty decently. In the right circumstances, a spiritmaster pet or a high evade shadowblade could even kinda-sorta tank. On Threshold , fighters, clerics, and warriors are all excellent tanks. Thieves (once they have dodge) can tank pretty well ok, and a really burly psion can do ok as well. Being a good player used to mean being able to fulfill different roles depending on your party makeup and what was needed. If you had a lot of damage in a party, some people would have to use more defensive tactics. If you had almost no healing, you would have to figure out how to compensate for that (and the answer was not always absolute: sometimes the answer was super fast damage to kill before being killed, and other times you needed at least one person to really focus on defense).
But nowadays, classes (and in particularly, specialization paths within classes) are so incredibly specific and pigeonholed that a player knows exactly what they are going to do for the most part. They are pretty much always going to use the same standard abilities (often in the same rotation) with only minor variations. Those of you who have only played modern MMOs may be thinking “but I change the abilities I use all the time.” Honestly, the degree to which games reward you for using different abilities and tactics now is NOTHING compared to the way it used to be.
So What Now, Mr. Doom and Gloom Muckbeast?
I hate to be so negative, but I don’t see this improving. As Dr. Richard Bartle once wrote, virtual worlds are designed by newbies :
Virtual worlds are being designed by know-nothing newbies, and there’s not a damned thing anyone can do about it. I don’t mean newbie designers, I mean newbie players - first timers. They’re dictating design through a twisted “survival of the not-quite-fittest” form of natural selection that will lead to a long-term decay in quality, guaranteed. If you think some of today’s offerings are garbage, just you wait…
Designers are dumbing things down because they see it as the only path to success and subscriptions. Perhaps the hope here happens to coincide with another goal of mine: the death of subscriptions. Perhaps if people could try and play games for free, they would be willing to show a little patience and see if the designer really does know what is best for his/her game. There is a lot of pressure to make a quick decision about a game when you are playing under the “free trial month.” Perhaps if that goes away, so will the pressure to decide quickly, and in the end people will be willing to try new things.
One can only hope, right?
We are in the WoW era, and most games will be based solely on that. But, hopefully with all the mmo’s being created, someone is trying to actualy be revolutionary instead of evolutionary. And even if the mmo fails, perhaps the really great parts will live on to give a bright future. Personally, as a bit of a Blizzard fanboy, I’m looking forward to their next mmo. Hopefully it will be drastically different from WoW (Which I do so enjoy, even if it’s dumbed down
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I often talk about Everquest 1 as being the best graphical MMO to ever exist. There were simply so many things they did right that any negatives were negated and then some. Playing classes in EQ took skill, concentration, and patience.
My favorite class by far was the enchanter. You want to talk about a difficult, challenging, and yet fun class to play, this was it. EQ 1 enchanter. In groups, they debuffed and were generally the main crowd control. Sometimes 1 enchanter would be keeping groups of 20+ mobs under control using various mesmerize, AE mesmerize, and AE stun spells simultaneously and strategically. That alone was more challenge than anything I’ve seen in WoW.
For me, the enchanter really shined when I played solo. I would do all of the above, in addition to my favorite spell: Charm. I would go into dungeons and charm some of the most dangerous monsters, buff them up with haste and +str and generally turned them into slaughtering machines. Then I would solo bosses meant to be killed by 5+ person groups. This was also done on a smaller scale for grinding and farming, and it was the most fun I’ve ever had playing any game.
What made it fun? Besides already being challenging for the reasons mentioned above, you also had to worry about the randomness of charm breaking unexpectedly. You then had 2 very angry monsters coming after you, one of whom is buffed out the ass by -you-. You had to react quickly and skillfully to get the battle going back your favor. Recreate EQ 1 with modern graphics, and there will be at least 1 guaranteed customer.
“Death, Where is Thy Sting?”
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I’m really not a fan of harsh death penalties. RPGs tend to have alot of randomness involved, and additionally network problems can crop up. Not to mention bugs. It can be relatively easy to die from something that is completely beyond your control, depending on the game.
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“I wish to be an all powerful genie! Yes! Yes! The power! The absolute power!”
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This is something I both disagree with you and agree with you on. I don’t really like slow levelling(particularly when you combine it with harsh death consequences). However, I don’t like it when it’s too fast either. For example, I’d say the advancement in Age of Conan is too fast. It took me about 5 days played to cap my ranger in that game, spread over 2.5 weeks. I was gaining new abilities so fast that I really hadn’t experimented with the old ones enough that to know the ins and outs of them. For me personally, WoW is probably about the right levelling speed(though I haven’t brought a character through since before they sped up 20-60). Fastest I got to cap in that game was about 3 months, which is just about right in my opinion.
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I’m also not a believer in the “the game starts at level cap” mindset. If I’m not having fun before I get to the cap, I stop playing the game. In WoW, for example, I played alot of battlegrounds from the level 30 bracket up. I’d often take even a week off of levelling once I hit the top of a bracket, and just run battlegrounds for fun instead. More games need stuff like this. AoC has got them, but they are pretty much dead. At least there was plenty of world pvp going on there though.
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“Go and tell your master that we have been charged by God with a sacred quest. If he will give us food and shelter for the night, he can join us in our quest for the Holy Grail.”
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I enjoy quests in some games, myself. In City of Villains, I was basically what you’d call a “quest grinder”. I levelled pretty much exclusively off of the random newspaper missions. They, however, had advantages over quests in other games. You could pull out the newspaper and get your missions wherever you were standing. Thus no running to a quest giver. Travel time was fairly quick, thus it didn’t take long to get to the mission site. The quest was complete the moment you accomplished the objective, you didn’t have to return to a questgiver. This all came together to make CoV quests really efficient and pretty fast as far as levelling goes. Also, if you were finding things too easy, you could turn up your mission difficulty, resulting in increased xp awards, making it even better.
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In WoW, I was probably about 60/40 quests/grinding. I’d quest until I found a good grinding spot, then grind like crazy til it was no good to me anymore, pking any Alliance characters that tried to grind in my spot. AoC I quested almost exclusively, but from what I hear getting some higher levels to AoE grind for you is far more efficient. I just have issues with being part of a party that I’m not contributing to, so I never tried it.
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“Hyper Specialization (Sorry, I’m a blog writing specialist now. I don’t find pictures. I don’t write witty headlines.)”
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I agree with you on this one totally. However, I think the players are just as much fault on this one as the devs are. I never play a hyper specialized character. Since I don’t raid, I don’t need to. In fact, because I’m a soloist/pvper, the game encourages me to diversify. I need some survivability. I need to be able to kill mobs and other players. Optimally, I’d have some crowd control too. I’ve been able to get all of that in CoH/CoV, AoC, and even WoW. Ultimately what it boils down to is that I typically trade in about 10-20% of my potential dps in order to increase my survivability/pvp ability by 50-100%. Is it the fault of the developers that the 10% I give up is made out to be so important, or is that the fault of the playerbase? I’m inclined to blame the playerbase, but that may be because I play dps rather than tank or healer. Is there really no specs for a tank or healer where you can afford to give up some proficiency at your specialty to beef up your ability to do something else? Does the game really require you to be at 100% potential, or is it the players that require it? It just seems to me like this is more a flaw of the uber raider culture than it is of the game itself.
When I first started playing online games in the mid-90’s, ‘leveling,’ wasn’t a word. You played a MUD, because the MUD was fun to play. Quests (as in developer created quests) were rare, and completing one was something special. There were also much fewer motivations to leveling, you didn’t know what skills you were going to get at level x, you were unaware of new abilities, or what mobs you’d be able to kill. That said, the majority of the game content came from other players.
“What’s that? A fighter murdered who? Okay, lets rally up and trap them in their guild hall, let them know we’re not to be messed with.” Now the fighters have to decide to turn one of their own over to the lynch mob outside, or sally out and fight, sneak a message and form an alliance with some other entity…and it goes on.
In the MUD I play now, there is no time (or incentive) to grind out levels unless you are really selfish or blind. Threats of invasion require all the players to work towards a goal. A plague near a civilized land causes a group of players to set up a research team, and compile all their findings. Church members have the potential to go Jihad on an opposed church. And that’s not even the thought of a scratch on the surface of the content in that game beyond your typical modern MMO.
All the while, the threat of Level and Gear loss is constant. You could call Threshold a hard game, but even though it’s hard, it’s incredibly fun. It’s not exactly newbie friendly in the current use of the term, but it is newbie supportive, it is designed well, and it does foster creativity.
When the game-world is dangerous, players will inevitably bond together. When players bond and groups are formed, player conflicts and hierarchies are equally inevitable. That plus involved developers, is what creates an online RPG with staying power, not bringing in massive amounts of players and trying to satisfy them all.
I have a bit of history with gaming, I played a couple of MUDs in my day, but they never really stuck with me. I wonder what grabs a person and not another one. I love reading books, I’m big into fantasy books and can imagine the whole story in my minds eye, yet I could never get immersed into a mud, and Threshold (and others) seem to require it to get the most out of it. I also never enjoyed DAoC or EQ. I was younger during the playtime with both games, and I didn’t have a guild back then, which obviously would have contributed to my enjoyment. Actually, I quit wow for a couple years until some FPS buddies started playing. I barely ever saw any RvR, and I only got to level 20 or so in EQ; I think had a necromancer. The thing about both games that bothered me was how slowly you progressed, and on top of that, when you died, it was setting you back so far I finally just couldn’t take it anymore. I was probaby doing something wrong, but it was far too frustrating back then. I think the key to success is that there is no 1 game that will ever satisfy everyone. I have no interest in a game that takes longer then a couple months to cap. If I’m not clearly progressing, I feel mired. If there were something else that made it feel as though you were progressing, then that would be satisfying also. A game needs a solid begining, middle, and end that really isn’t an end but opens up other ways of advancement. I think the only way to achieve this is either player created content, or rapid developer content, or a combination of both.
“See, I think in a way you might be overtaken by the modern MMO concept. Why this obsession with cap? What if you could NEVER reach the cap? I mean honestly, that would be the best thing imho. One of the worst things about “trash” in games like WoW is you don’t need xp, so killing stuff is worthless. In a game where you spend most of your life *NOT* at cap, everything you do has benefit and value to your character. No matter where you are or what you are fighting, your character is getting better. That’s a very cool thing imho.”
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The primary reason is because I don’t like other players having a large advantage over me in pvp. Now, levels don’t neccessarily have to give a huge pvp advantage. AoC actually does this pretty well. I was able to pk people up to 20 levels higher than me solo, and up to 30 levels higher than me while paired. Basically, as long as level doesn’t actually figure into any of the game’s pvp combat equations, I think an endless advancement game can work for me.
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From what I remember, Shadowbane had a form of endless advancement. Basically, there was a “soft” level cap of 70. After that, you didn’t gain new abilities, skill points, etc. Each level you gain past that you gain a few hp/mana/stamina(like maybe 10 on a character with 2000 hp). It wasn’t much, but if you really wanted to keep advancing you could, and you’d at least get something for it.
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I suspect I’d -much- rather have an endless level grind than an endless item grind. Level would have to not mean as much as it does in the typical game for it to work though, and I’d still want access to all of my abilities reasonably quickly(at least the basic rank/level of them).
Gustov wrote: “I have no interest in a game that takes longer then a couple months to cap.”
Damn, in one game I play I’ve been stuck at the same level for multiple years. Is it frustrating? Yes. Do I still have fun playing? Yes. Why? Because there are many other enjoyable things to do in the game than level up. What will I do when I finally manage to get that next level? Whoop and holler!
@ Ducky - as long is there is something to do that is advancement, it’s still fun. Levels aren’t the only way to advance =) I agree with Outsider, it’s mostly about the disparity, if you remove that, I have no issues. This mostly applies to pvp for me also.
This made me giggle when I seen the title, since I just wrote a, somewhat, contradictory post to this before noticing this. Mines asks if players of World of Warcraft are uniquely skilled and should perhaps receive recognition for what they are able to do, although I am placing emphasis on playing ability (hand movements etc)…
Interesting though, and I do agree that dying/coming back to life, especially in WoW, is too easy. People even deliberately die just to get closer to the location they wish to reach! Although I guess with todays ‘1 minute attention span’ generation it needs to be that way or games will lose players. It’s a double ended sword unfortunately…
I think the “1 minute attention span” style is basically an overreaction to the over the top grindiness that old school mmos were known for(whether the reputation is accurate or not I really don’t know, but it was one of the things that pushed me away from mmos up til a couple years ago).
Yeah, it’s like nobody does stuff for fun in mmos anymore. I loved doing battlegrounds in WoW. I would have done them even if there were no rewards for them. Most players seemed to treat them as a chore to get gear though. Most players seem to treat -everything- as a chore to get gear, now that I think about it.
I have to say that I completely disagree with you on the “death should penalize you” thing. The number of times where I have had a character die for reasons completely unrelated to anything that was my “fault” defies counting.
Flying somewhere and cat steps on keyboard dismounting you?
Death.
Finish an epic fight of about 10 minutes that you really shouldn’t have been able to do on your own but you managed to anyway, and then something respawns or someone decides to gank you?
Death.
(In more rp based games)
Misread an NPC’s intentions because the obscure clues that were dropped only made sense to the dev and the three people he explained it to?
etc.
Death needs to be just enough of a deterrent to get you to want to do things right the first time, and circumstances should be flexible to allow different solutions, but sometimes the cat just steps on your keyboard. (Or your connection fails, I just like the image of the cat.)
I also have to disagree with your characterization of quests, though I think this might be because you went just a little too far in your critique induced enthusiasm : ). If you have a situation where you need to grind for something, I’d much rather be doing it finding out more about the game world or in such a way that it makes “sense” in some way for the character to be doing it. Going out and slaughtering one particular type of pig because it’s the easiest one to gain exp from kind of breaks my suspension of disbelief and investment in the game’s world.
These things said, I have to say that I pretty much agree with your other comments, and they would probably alleviate those issues I disagree with you on.
If content was not a grind, if the journey was as fun as the destination, or if you could go back and re-experience content scaled to your character’s abilities, then being totally set back by death or being totally unaffected by it wouldn’t really matter.
Similarly, in PvP, there is such an emphasis placed on gear grinds because the pure stats of items completely outweighs any skill. There is no way a person in greens in WoW will ever take out someone in purple. They may be terrible, walking into every trap you set for them, casting nukes right into your spell reflection, or whatever, but their stats win out.
It reminds me of the old board game Talisman, where you could reach a point where you just couldn’t physically be stopped by another player, no matter what they did. They just had to hope you ran into enough random encounters that automatically made you lose a life to reset you to a starting character. But in these MMOs/MUDs, that will never happen. And, practically speaking, you can never, ever catch up with them gear-wise unless you too invest the bajillion hours to get that gear in the same way. They kinda “deserve” an edge to warrant their work, but not so much as to twist incentives in the way they currently are.
I don’t really see any way to completely solve these problems for WoW and the games modeled off it, as they are structurally built in, as much fun as I had playing them.
A lot of the things you’ve said here relate so much to the other great posts you’ve made.
Get rid of character levels and gear as means of progression and them being the defining stats of your char. Skill, tricks, knowledge should matter. It would also stop older levelling zones from becoming obsolete. Fighting a wolf with 10 hp with a 1 dps sword is not so much different from fighting a black 100 hp wolf with a 10 dps sword, after all.
Guild Wars has already explored alternative ways of character development, like fancier skins, reputation systems and so on. I liked, despite all shortcomings, Ultima Online’s open ended point and training system the most out of all systems. You could retrain your swordsman to a bard or tamer, if you wished.
Darkfall is going to try something very similar. It is about time, the +10 level per expansion and the levevl system in general are tried and true, but flawed and I doubt it is the only way a meaningful MMO can be made.
Leveling should take skill, not just downright excessive amounts of grinding. High risk/death penalty is good…only if a skilled player can recover from it quickly. Note the word SKILLED. Having endless hours to invest is not the mark of a good player.
Basically gaming (especially MMOs/MUDS) have lost the whole risk/reward balance. You either have no real risk whatsoever, or risk that can only recovered from by HOURS of repetitive monster slaying. Best MUD I ever played you could lose your character taking a big risk, but if you didn’t die you got quite the reward.
In terms of Threshold, a better model would be to have say 1/10th a player level loss of XP for “normal” fights. But, have a higher death penalty for certain boss fights/areas that give far more xp/serious player competitions. Give skilled players the ability to gain an edge that doesn’t just involve investing more time into the game.
Personally I hate grinding games, mainly because I find it extremely mind-numbing killing digital pixels repetitively, even when there are a variety of monsters at the mercy of my blade. No matter how many monsters you kill, it’s all the same- monsters die, collects loot, repeat.
Then there’s the time issue.
I don’t have the luxury of playing an online game 2+ hours a day, reality occupies most of my time, so I can never see myself matching the people who play 5+ hours or more a day in a grinding game.
My first online MMORPG is Lineage. To this day there are still many playing, and one of the reasons is because of the grind factor. There is essentially no level cap, basically the cap is as long as you “live”, and consequences for dieing, upgrading, and even player-killing/pvp is huge (although penalties lessened over the years, it’s still very harsh imo).
I guess what I am trying to say is that what you are encouraging in essence for a more “sophisticated” game should not focus too much on the grinding content, rather the game should listen to and adapt to the gamers. The reason why WoW is so successful is because it caters to the masses- the masses can only dedicate so much time and energy (and money) to an online game. Through WoW’s success comes financial resources to further develop and include harder and more challenging content.
So many hyped up games failed on launch is because they simply tried to do too much and the average gamer can’t digest it, accompanied by poor management and chaotic subscription you have a disastrous game. My suggestion for upcoming MMOs is try to establish a player base that can understand the system without spending too much time in it. Once you have that player base, you can work from there- such as build a healthy gaming community, and before you know it, word of mouth will propel your game to the masses.