MMO Rant #5: The PvE End Game
Ah the massively multiplayer online end game. MMOEG. Yeah, it probably deserves that label. Why? Because so many games dramatically alter the gameplay landscape if you ever manage to get there. That consistent and fun experience you’ve been participating in for hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours, suddenly changes to something completely different. Often times, that experience not only changes dramatically, but it suddenly requires near-infinitely more dedication and time to hang with the crowd. I, for one, am tired of it.
Why do many games completely change the landscape of play at the end? Well, there’s a few reasons, but the most annoying one to me is that the game as it was all the way to max level wasn’t fun enough to sustain itself without the level grind. Yeah. Meaning, a big part of the reason people even got to the end in the first place was to get to the end, not because the journey itself was fun. Otherwise, that same style of play could remain without the need for levels at all, right?
Well, maybe. I’ll admit that it may not be the fault of developers entirely, and rather the fault of human psychology (or probably more correctly, the human brain). But I like to blame the developers, because there’s gotta be a better way to reward people even if they don’t keep getting pretty number increases in their level.
Let’s pretend that it’s completely okay for the gameplay experience to change entirely at the end game. It’s okay that the experience people have come to love and expect out of the game for hundreds or thousands of hours is abruptly and dramatically changed. What, then, would I have to complain about? All of it.
Raiding. Yeah, killing uber cool mobs is fun once or twice per mob. Coordinating dozens of players at once is fun sometimes too. What’s not fun about it? The routine. The repetition. The fact that nearly the only option you have is to stand around and wait for that raid mob to be up and ready for the killing. I don’t have any other options except to fart around until the next multi-hour chaos session that is raiding.
That’s the big part that really cheeses me off. Raiding is, apparently, the de facto standard for all PvE end games, and most developers seem to believe that raiding and raiding alone is quite enough to satisfy. They don’t care that much about live content to keep my appetite sated, they don’t let me participate in the intrigue of a world, they don’t give me any real alternatives to the endless routine of raiding the same old mobs over and over. And I’m tired of it.
I want a game that keeps me engaged after I’ve “reached the end” (or maybe one that the end somehow doesn’t exist in) without forcing a new style of play on me, without requiring MORE time than I’ve already dedicated to the game, without making me repeat the same old crap over and over again. I want a game that’s willing to give me PvE content at the end game that is actually fun, so I have some sort of motivation to actually get there and keep playing.
MMO Rant #5: The PvE End Game
I want people to stop expecting an end-game and instead for the game to end.
I stopped playing EQ2 after about 18 months having just hit level 50 (when 70 was the cap) with my main, the game had already started changing by that point and wasn’t as much fun as it had been 0-40.
There are two reasons for the end-game to exist, one is to keep hold of those who play so much they reach the level cap before their natural boredom threshold is reached, the other is for those people who want a game of raids and speed-levels just to get there.
Since neither of these groups are the most profitable MMO customers why not ignore them. Build the game for those who will play for a year or two, a few hours or so a week, and in all that time might not even reach the cap.
They use less server & CS resources, need less content produced and so produce greater profit per player than the players you are ignoring. You don’t need to devote the significant Dev resources to churning out new raids to keep the end-gamers happy because they are ignored.
No End-Game, just let the game end.
Would players still play hundreds of hours if the game simply ended at the end, and their character no longer existed? I personally wouldn’t. Then again, if the end game paradigm were different, the rest of the game would likely be different as well.
Most PvE games focus on levelling, but once you reach max level, there’s nothing left to do, so the developers have to add in some sort of ‘end game’ to hold the interest of people once the levelling is done and the game no longer offers the stimulus response that keeps the behavior from going extinct.
From a behaviorist standpoint, end game content is actually better at retaining players than the levelling of the pre-end-game. Raiding, and the upgrading of a character through random drops relies on what is known as variable ratio renforcement, while levelling uses variable interval renforcement. Variable ratio renforcement works by giving a reward after a varying number of succesful actions – in the case of most end game raids, that means you get a reward in the form of an item upgrade at a variable rate due to the random nature of drops. This sort of a reward system is proven to keep people coming back and making attempt after attempt. Levelling, on the other hand, occurs after you get a fixed amount of experience, but the interval between levels varies based on how quickly you accumulate the necessary experience. So, the end game as it currently stands in games like WoW and EQ2 is actually quite profitable in that it is very well designed to retain customers.
That said, the current state of end-game raiding is very contrived and doesn’t offer much in the way of gameplay outside of repeating the same few zones and encounters over and over. So, what alternatives are there?
Social advancement. What I mean by this is that players can ascend to leadership positions, running villages, towns and even cities. They can control trading companies or armies, command castles, churches and organized crime rings. Rather than have characters advance through levels in the traditional sense, they advance through organizations, gaining more power and influence as they progress. As characters aquire greater rank, with it comes greater resonsibility. A neophyte priest might one day be entrusted to minister to a village, looking after it’s spiritual needs, and as if he proves capable, his flock would increase. Perhaps, however, he is more partially inclined, and seeks to hunt down the enemies of the faith. He might be giving a team of inquisitors to root out heresy and blasphemy at home, or perhaps he commands a troop of templars and sworn knights who take the fight to the heathen hordes beyond the boundries of the civilized world.
Under such a system, the ‘end game’ is simply the pinnicle of achievement within a particular organization, but evens till, one must now manage that position. A lord who squanders his resources, abuses his farmers and fails to maintain his feudal levy will not be a lord for long. Wars, natual disasters and other major events also take their toll and keep even the veteran players on their toes. Such a game would be as much about strategic resource management like the Caesar or Sim City games as it would be about roleplaying and slaying dragons.
Another idea I’ve been toying with is a game where you play a spirit that is attempting to achieve nirvana or some such state of enlightenment. As you play, you are reincanrated in different forms, and must accomplish certain things to learn particular lessons in order to reach higher stages of enlightenment. I am still working out exactly how this would play out as a game, but I think it would offer a different perspective and the game would simply end at some point if your spirit manages to achieve enlightenment.
At a more general level, what I envision is a game where the character follows a story arc up to a climactic ending that ultimately offers some sense of resolution. If the game simply ends, there’s no resolution, but if the game plays out more like a novel, then the ending is a necessary component to the the story. Playin a different character offers a different story, even if it is set in the same world.
Would players still play hundreds of hours if the game simply ended at the end, and their character no longer existed? I personally wouldn’t.
You’re looking at it from the perspective of someone who levels fast though, your one of the people who are high annoyance and low profit (The group that will make a fuss about things that are not right, that complain there isn’t enough content etc while playing alot and using lots of resources for your monthly payment.) [Not that you are personnally annoying obviously]
With targeting the slow leveling / occasional playing group, you can spend all your time developing content for another 10 levels for the slower majority and not raid content for the faster minority. So very few of your target audience would ever actually reach the level cap and the thing to strive for is always more levels.
@lisasdarren
If you target the slow leveling players / occasional playing group, and have almost zero endgame content, won’t you still have the quick leveling crowd come in, burn through your game, and then complain that there’s nothing to do at the top? That will be disheartening to hear for players working up, because a big motivator in MMOs is that your invested time is worth something at the end of the day because there’s always something to do at the top.
If your game is hard enough or enough of a grind that it takes a LONG time to hit max level, you won’t keep players because it won’t be worth slogging through the grind with no reward at the top. If it’s much easier, like in WoW, you’ll have even the casual players max their chars in a matter of months, get bored, and you’ve lost subscribers.
I’m one of those “Endgame” players in EQII. I’m L70, and I raid several times a week.
TBH there is nothing wrong with raiding, and like Dasein put it, it keeps customers. It keeps me coming back.
But there is more than just raiding. There should also be very difficult / challenging heroic (or even solo, to a lesser extent) content. I’m a questaholic in EQII, and when I’m not raiding I’m often off doing quests.
And yes the gearing up is part of the end-game… but thats because of the itemcentricity of the games nowadays (something Blackguard/Ryan already talked about in a previous post/rant type thing).
I also believe some kind of endgame is absolutely essential. Targeting the “we play casually” crowd might seem like a good idea — you save resources and make more per player. But you also don’t get nearly as many players, IMHO. If theres “You killed . Congratulations. Now go start another character, this character has completed the game” is NOT what a MMO is supposed to be to me. The point of an MMO is to be open ended — there shouldn’t be an end.
I like Dasein’s suggestion of taking a sort of position — it’s one thing I’ve longed to see in an MMO but haven’t yet seen (besides like Lineage II, but thats not the kind of implementation I mean).
And also add dynamic content. Make it so that the zone isn’t the same over and over… it could be similar and have similar objectives, but still make it new each time. Use ‘building block’ type zone pieces that can be put together in any way to make randomized maps. And randomize NPCs too.
Example: You go into an orc stronghold. It changes every time, but your goal of “retrieve from ” is generally the same idea, but not the same. Yeah by the nature of random it’ll become repetative after a time, but it’ll be much less repetative than fixed zones and such.
And also, release new content every now and then. Even if its only a handfull of quests or a small zone once a month, it lets you keep things ‘fresh.’ On the idea of keeping things fresh — the world needs to have a progression, prefably player-controlled. This could be the new monthly/weekly content right there.
Example (using EQII): A new, medium-sized island with an abandoned fortress is discovered in a strategic location. Naturally, both Qeynos and Freeport would want their hands on it. So both set up camps on opposite ends of the islands at beaches. And then over time, things change. For example, for the first two weeks the folks at either side give a quest that requires folks to help out in setting up the base. And then, after the 2 weeks depending on the relative ratio of quests between the sides, the camps expand somewhat. IE if the camps can expand up to “3″ then if they tie (1:1 ratio) they each expand 2. If one gets 2:1 then it gets 3 and the other gets 2. If ones gets 4:1, then it gets 3 and the other gets 1. And then continue that out over a good amount of time until one group reclaims the fortress and then has to fortify (while the other has to try to seize the fortress — and it could switch hands to keep it going).
I believe I can safely say that, as a player, we LOVE it when we can influence the world in a tangible way. So, make the world run down.
Say you need folks to keep the city of Qeynos in repair. And then have the ‘sabotage’ quests actually let it go into disrepair. Of course keep a minimum (ie the city itself can’t be completely destroyed) but give some perks for keeping things ship-shape.
IE, say if you keep the alchemist’s place fully repaired, then he’ll have the time to make some special potions. Nothing too powerful, but maybe say 50% runspeed or 10% stackable haste or dps. Nifty, but not overpowering, and a perk to working for the world you live in.
I agree, there has to be something at the end. Although sometimes I wish it were something different than raiding. People take raiding way too seriously. Raiding the same mob night after night after night gets boring. Spending 4 hours just to get to the main mob is horrid. It would be great to see a game have something waiting at the end that has not been done before.
The problems with the “endgame” start well before the “end.”
Once upon a time, we tried to “condition” players for the end of level advancement. We went through a quick “learning curve” phase of leveling, where advancement came fast as the player learned to manage the controls, then we hit a slightly-slower “defining a character” phase where the advancement eventually fleshed out the character.
Once those phases are complete, we settle into a “mature character” where the advancement gets progressively slower AND the advancement reward became less character-defining. This helped prepare us for that “level cap” by re-prioritizing from “build the character” into other gameplay styles.
Over time, we lost that “less character defining” element in the higher levels, we lost that incentive to re-prioritize and instead feel like we must “grind a little further” to get our character complete. As developers, we focus more and more on the “sure thing” of leveling and less on the rich diversity of play that would give people something else to focus on.
In my opinion they should not take out the end game. What I would prefer to see instead is to start raiding earlier.
When WoW was in beta they started out with a level cap of 25 or 30. Sure everyone raced to get to that cap, but then they grouped and “raided” the dungeons. All the content was being used. Then they raised the cap a few more levels and everyone moved on to the next set of dungeons.
I would like to see if a game where it would not allow you to level past certain points until you completed x, y, z quests/dungeons/whatever. You don’t need to stop “progression” at this point or stop “experience” gain. Give players AA (maybe something like EQ1) to put experience towards so that they don’t feel like they aren’t gaining anything.
Perhaps even make a dungeon that is required for progression for a certain level a raid of 12-24 for that level, but after they start leveling again it would become an experience/loot while you are working towards your next level cap. This would also present the opportunity for higher level people to help people trying to complete the quest/dungeon for their progression.
The problem with a capped character going on to have positions within the game world is that there are only so many such positions that could be filled, and given time many more characters will be at cap than there are positions to be filled. Then what? Fighting for the positions? In-game ways to unseat people? First time someone figures an exploit to oust someone else there would be a riot.
The ascension idea is in practice in a solo-only webgame, Kingdom of Loathing. In a MMO environment, balance gets even further out of whack, as the designers would have to program for far more potential combinations of abilities.
So what to do? You could try something like Vanguard, with three spheres of abilities that the character can raise levels, but there is no guarantee that players will be interested in raising their level in more than one sphere. There are lots of characters in EQ2 who are high level adventurers but not crafters because crafting bores those players to tears.
You could have players create content once their characters get to or near the cap, but the developers would have to be very careful of the kind of content allowed to be made, lest you turn the game into something that can’t keep a ‘T’ ESRB rating and ruin what attempt at balance the devs have put in place already. That is/was my experience with MUDs back in the early ’90s. Once you got to level cap, you could create content, with the constraints of those who ran the server. Linden Labs has managed to do that in a modern MMO environment, but that isn’t an item-centric PvE game.
Player driven in-character roleplay does help to alleviate this problem – however there aren’t always roleplay specific servers. Even when there are, people get on the server who neither know nor care what roleplay is, and advance through the games as they would on a normal server.
Roleplaying builds a community from the player base but the problems with it being that roleplay is cliqueish – and if someone in the clique isnt fond of your ideas of roleplay, you’re ousted or ignored.
Roleplaying your character in a rolyplaying game isn’t always doable.
And thats the main problem with the roleplaying games of today. There’s no storylines like the old days of sitting around playing dragon warrior looking for edricks armor. Sure, you can quest and use the quests as your storylines, but the thousand square mile game worlds almost insure that you’ll see no one off the beaten paths. There’s also no required interaction like the MUDS and MOOs of the 80s and 90s. You don’t even have to look at your chat box anymore to play the games – so interaction dies down and you have your clique but that’s it.
Until you see everyone around you who looks cooler than you because their weapon is huge, or their armor glows, or their eyeballs shoot fireballs on regular intervalls all by themselves. They’re raiding for content designed for function, yes – but mostly to look freaking cool on their game engines. Lets be honest. If all the rewards and drops from 40 man raids were helmets that looked like brown paper bags, no one would ever raid.
So then casual player X joins a raid guild, levels to the cap, and goes raiding. He does exactly what Uber McSpankntank says because hes the class lead and rules player Xs world. Player X gets fed bones from the table to keep him raiding, but McSpankntank keeps all the class goodies to himself – dispite the diferance in upgrade between him and player X. DKP systems, loot reels, whatever the big raiding guilds do use helps to keep it somewhat fair, but casual player X needs to become invested raider X to make any real use of said systems.
End game raiding is not end game raiding when your drops never drop, your loot systems never work to your favor, and your community never acts as a helpful unit.
In my opinion, while getting that one rare insane drop out of nowhere truely does make your week, maybe even your month if you can use the item, turning all endgame drops into endgame quest rewards makes a whole lot more sense. That way when 40 people walk into a dungeon, 40 people walk out with something special. This works against the MMOs sales team though, because if everyone is able to gear up all their slots after X number of runs of rewards, its a HIGHLY SUBSTANTIALY LESSER NUMBER than the amount of times it would take those same 40 people to get all their items via drops.
This means that devs need to add less content, players keep playing for longer (subscription costs $$), and people are too busy crossing their fingers for a drop to notice bugs or imbalance issues.
Is this really what we pay for? Is this really what we want to play?