Just drop it. Make it so that once you are fully out of the tutorial you are starting the end-game, and even if the only thing your devs do instead is drink cappucino, you still have a net win.

[...] Shwayder touched on this a while ago in his MMO Rant #10:  The Mid Game. In that article, Ryan points out that: “[Developers] only ever make the beginning and end of [...]

[...] The Midgame Agency and MT Know what you know Killing PvE The NDA and [...]

This is actually quite an ironic statement, given that Blizzard explicitly attempted to avoid players classifying Alliance as “good” and Horde as “evil.” According to their story, neither is actually good or evil, they just have different views and opposing goals.

The last thing I did in City of Villains was a project named Brutal Speed. Everyone took one of a small pool of possible characters, so forming groups was always “5 from group B, 3 from group C.” Everyone was really excited about level 20, because all the corruptors got Speed Boost: endless speed and recovery. The 40s are notoriously grindy for City of Heroes/Villains, but Brutal Speed was really looking forward to it because all the corruptors got Fulcrum Shift at 38: endless damage. You could complain fairly that the players had to engineer the big shift, but for us the game changed quite a bit as we hit certain milestones in character development.

WoW was my first and only MMO, and I quit once I got to lvl 40, because I was so sick of kill & collect quests. I didn’t play often enough to get a consistent group of players – I would play with someone and the next time I logged in they would be ten levels above me. The knowledge that what I mainly had left to look forward to was raiding, I figured it was all a bit pointless…

But when I re-start the game and Fizzlecog still needs someone to find his sprocket that was lost or Amdir (LOTRO) still guides me through the same instances, the world looses a lot of it appeal. Persistent Worlds are not fun, in that we are not using the word persistent to mean a world that is always online, but a world that is always persistent in that nothing changes from them. I’ve recently gone back in to EverQuest II after playing a few other games (World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online and Beta Testing some others), and while they’ve made some changes to the newbie zones, and added in Neriak and Faydwer. There still is not much fun to be found for me in a game that is primarily designed to be soloed till you reach the end game or get beyond the mind levels. Yes there are dungeons and Heroic Quests, but when the ‘lower’ population is scarce these are not things I get to look forwards to doing ‘again’ in the game.

Also with the alternates, there is the trade-skilling that you could create alternate toons to trade-skill the items you need as you level up. I mean I get 6 slots for characters and for your main character or for an alternate character that you’re leveling up at this time. You’ll also have access to a greater deal of wealth to buy items from the brokers (player market) should you want to make life even easier and at the same time more dull in leveling. It tends to become a greater rat race to higher levels as you seek to find other players at your level range to group with and communicate with, should you not choose to get involved in all the /ooc chatter about topics that are pretty immature most of the time.

Ryan does bring up a key point in that there needs to be more avenues at the mid-game for players to partake in. While I don’t want to be told to me to start a Human in EQII and then betray to Faydwer just to get this new path, these paths should have been put in from the get go. One ideal that I talk about was epic quests starting from the very early levels such as the noobie level and then progressing to the end game. But this would not be a system where there was just one epic quest line per race class combination. I am talking about 5 in the first generation of this design and then progressing to 31 in later generations. To where it would depend on which day you created your character or a random generation at character creation would select your epic story. This would help break up the game and help players not feel like they are doing the same mouse maze over and over.

Another thing I miss from games gone by is the need to group. While I understand why we’ve gone away from this mechanic (because its easy, and we’ll get less hate mail from players). I know I for one loose a lot of motivation to go out fishing while waiting or when taking a break from the grind in EQII, since I can’t sell the fish to merchants for some small amount of coin. In EQII, all harvestable items are not merchant sellable, since they are overly common in the world, even at the ‘end game’ harvested items are common. In EverQuest II they’ve given us the Gibbler (spelling), who will run a video poker like system for 10sp per play. While not a bad ideal, for those whom don’t have a lot of coin to start with, this usually will give us a few play before we need to move on to find other places to make money or advance our characters.

Remove the linear paths of advancement through the world, when we play games today, we are not asked to tread through zones with much higher content than our own. They horde us through the game like a bunch of cattle being rounded up for slaughter at the end game where ‘good’ and ‘evil’ has long been irrelevant in the player base or to the guilds that are created. Heck, I think the good vs. evil loose a lot of its relevance in the transition from design document and concept to beta. Only World of Warcraft has done a ‘decent’ job in this area.

There was talk about the crafters and giving them meaningful things to do. EverQuest II added in writs for the trade-skill sphere of game play. Vanguard did the same, but in Vanguard a few of us asked to have these work orders be given from the NPC’s of the cities and outlying areas. Why shouldn’t crafters feel more apart of the cities they inhabit, and why should the NPC’s (citizens) of the city also seek out crafted items for them homes (deleted items from game). Why are games created from the onset to have buildings that need to be finished or built that crafters can help take part in. There are a lot of things we can give the crafters of the world to do in these games, but since crafting has always been treated as a secondary profession to adventuring, we get systems that are not geared towards the purest.

For me though, a big let down in the middle game is the fact the world really does not remember me too well. Unless I talk to the same NPC’s that does not have a quest icon above their head, which they will tell me thanks for doing this or doing that for them.

Another aspect is the loss of multiple cities to explore. As the games progressed (in generations) we are loosing more and more things each generation or game that is released. EverQuest had like 9 starting cities, to where World of Warcraft had 3, and EverQuest II had 2, when the games were released.

There is also talk of dynamic worlds, and while I am still doing some research on a why this could be done with ‘little’ developer resources after launch, it is an area that would be nice to see. But there are some major questions that would need to be solved… who gets to be the one to change the political or populations (wilderness) of the world. Do we still create a game where Heroes can have 24,000 or more deaths in less than 3 years of game play? Do we allow guild who basically exploit lack of hard coded game rules to run or dictate the servers changes (All Race / All Class) guilds that take on both good and evil characters for the sake of gaining mass numbers and getting the best race/class combo’s to help take away some of the challenges the designers tried to create in the first place.

Access quests in EverQuest II when I played it at release time were great, but I would often find myself either out leveling them when I got to the quest that needed access or I was too far under them and needed to grind some levels in order to do them. Then there was the fact that a higher level could come in group with the party and get them in to the area, and also mentor them, taking away all and any need to do them. This came from the fact that EverQuest II had too many quests most of the time in given areas, and since Questing is such a great advantage to leveling, you wanted and tried to do as many as you could. Then with the quest journal (your personal PDA in a medieval setting), you could and most likely would go in to an area and gathered as many as you could (looking for icons above heads) and then set out in to the world to complete them. I am not just picking in EverQuest II here, there are many games that fall in to these traps, and quests area marketing tool for the magazine or banner ads, we have x,xxx quests or we’ve added xxx quests since launch. I don’t feel quests should give such a boost to advancement that they loose much of their aspects of storytelling. Quests should not be so harvestable as our trade-skill items in the world.

These games are fun and can remain fun if you find a group of people who ‘LIKE’ playing with each other so much then forget the grind and keep around the same levels as those they ‘LIKE’ playing with so they can continue to group with each other. This is often only found with real-life friends. Since almost everyone who plays MMO’s these days know that the best gear and money are at the end game, which is where players want to be from day one. Since developers pretty much hand players the end game (fast leveling rates), player grind to it. There is zero to only a handful of items to be found in the mid game that will last you through or even past the end game, there is little to no need to pay attention to the middle game.