The Next Big Thing

I claimed that this blog will used to cover all manner of topics, but here's another one about MMOs anyway.

            So I mentioned in my previous post that for years now, different upcoming games have been touted as "the next big thing," and by that, of course, I mean that game that will supplant wow as the go to MMO.  It's a given that eventually something will come along and unseat WoW... eventually.  During a bout of insomnia the other night, I embarked upon a brainstorming session, reflecting upon what exactly this hypothetical wow-killer will actually do that other would-be challengers haven't.  I came up with the following list of thing that I think a next gen, big name MMO will have to successfully pull off.  So first on my list of things that I feel the next great MMO will have to address is...

The Grind

      
            Prior to wow, my leveling up experience in MMOs generally went something like this:  Either you put up your LFG tag, and find something else to do (I would generally read a book), while periodically checking your chat log to see if anyone had messaged you (on multiple occasions I've had this step take several hours).  Alternatively, you could attempt to form a group yourself.  Once you've either been invited, or hunted down a healer, tank and the various types of damage dealers necessary for a full group, you would then collectively decide on where you were going to go set up your experience farming camp, usually in the form of an argument between your groupmates.  After the location was finally decided on, you began the business of actually getting to your chosen location.  If your group makeup didn't consist of anyone with fast traveling abilities, this part could take a substantial amount of time in the form of traversing dangerous terrain and/or dungeons (you could usually expect at least one person to get themselves killed or lost during this part).  Once you finally arrived at your chosen camp, you then had to hope that it wasn't already occupied, by other players, since dungeons generally were not instanced.  If everything lined up properly, you could  look forward to hours of excitement, parking your character in the same spot while your group repeatedly killed the same groups of creatures as they respawned.  Though, most of the time, after three pulls someone would remember that they had somewhere else to be, at which point you began the process anew.

            One of Vanilla WoW's biggest accomplishments was putting an end to that kind of silliness.  WoW still had a level up grind, but the developers at Blizzard took steps to obscure it.  They did this in two ways:  Through solo play, and the questing system.  WoW had the audacity to allow players to attain max level completely solo, which for me was unheard of at the time.  Removing the need for players to subject themselves to the hours of needless back and forth that had previously been the MMO grouping experience freed them to actually engage in leveling their characters (of course, if you wanted to run a dungeon in early WoW, the experience still very closely resembled what I explained in the previous paragraph).  The second aspect hiding the leveling grind was WoW's then revolutionary questing system.  Questing gave the player all manner of short-term goals to concentrate on (kill 10 Quillboars, collect 5 rocks), as opposed to solely focusing on how far away they were from their next level, which could be fairly demoralizing when you realized that you were 5 or more hours away from your next level.

            WoW's solo/questing system was great for its time.  However, WoW was released over eight years ago.   After that much time some of the deficiencies in the system have become a bit pronounced.  Anyone who's leveled multiple alts knows just how grindy the leveling process can actually get.  Blizzard has taken some steps towards introducing parallel leveling methods:   leveling through random instances and leveling through pvp - I think that those are steps in the right direction, but that it's definitely time to try something new.  Thankfully video games in general are a very iterative medium, and several other games in the genre offer some insight into ways that the MMO leveling experience could be improved upon:  The Old Republic, The Secret World, and Dungeons and Dragons Online.

The Eternity Vault - I wanted this raid to be good.  It was not.

            For me, the biggest take-away from The Old Republic and The Secret World (Other than that reskinning WoW in Star Wars clothing makes for a poor experience) is that when done right, story and atmosphere can be very positive impacts on the player experience.  I could write entire posts on what those two games did wrong (and maybe I will), but both games' main story quests did excellent jobs of making me want to press on through the crap to find out what was going to happen next.  The story lines in both games were interesting enough that they distracted me from the fact that in both games, the actual gameplay was fairly derivative, boring, and less fun than WoW's.  This was exasperated by the time you hit max level in The Old Republic.  The story goes away, and all you're left with is the crap.  I also think that I should make special mention of The Secret World's investigation quests.  These quests generally didn't involve combat, and focused on exploration and puzzle solving.  One early quest particularly stands out for me - it has you tabbing out of the game to "hack" one of the corporation's websites in your web browser.

Exploring Solomon Island in The Secret World.

            For years I've maintained that Dungeons and Dragons Online actually benefitted from that fact that it was in development before WoW's release.  Due in part to that, DDO is definitely its own thing, rather than one of the legion of WoW.  One of the best aspects of DDO's leveling system is that each quest (or "adventure" as the game calls them) takes place in its own dungeon (there are a few exceptions to this, where adventures have you revisiting the same area several times, this is the exception and not the rule).  Also, DDO generally shies away from the kind of mundane tasks that so many WoW quests would have the player carry out (go pick me 5 mushrooms).  In DDO, it is entirely possible to level to the maximum without repeating a single adventure.  This is assuming you've bought enough content, since the game is free to play, and monetizes itself by selling its quests in "adventure packs".  Therein lies one of DDO's big weaknesses in my eyes.  Since the game is so modular, based on its free to play business model, many of its quests don't have much in the way of overarching story lines, though the new Forgotten Realms content is much better in that regard.  In short, DDO has good adventures with sub-par storytelling, and The Secret World and The Old Republic have interesting stories, but poor gameplay issues.

One of DDO's Sewer Levels - There Are many.
Turbine broke this link when they changed the URL on their main site.

            So then!  After all that, I propose the following as an alternative to the standard WoW-style MMO leveling grind:  Reduce the routine uninteresting tasks that the player is asked to perform.  No more farmers asking the player to collect grapes for them, no more killing specific numbers of specific creatures, or even worse trying to collect animal body parts that for some reason do not have a 100% drop rate (what?! evidently this boar had no intestines!).  These things serve to pad out the play experience anyway.   Keep the player's tasks heroic, or at least interesting, and remember that everything should be in service to an engaging story line.  I envision a system wherein the player enters a new area for the first time and embarks on a series of adventures (to borrow the term from DDO), rather than just checking tedious tasks off their quest log.  This is what plagued The Old Republic's leveling experience for me.  I was primarily interested in seeing how the main story played out, but the game required that you take regular breaks from the overarching story line, by imposing all manner of random WoW style, non-story quest hubs, that needed to be played through in order to gain the necessary experience to actually progress the story.

            While I'm bitching about TOR again, one final thing of note:  Games really need to offer multiple paths for the player to advance through the game.  I understand that this takes more development time, but in the long run it's worth it.  One of The Old Republic's other sins (there are many), was that every character's story took them through the same series of planets.  Every.  Single.  Time.

            So yes.  It's time that the grind went away.  It's an outdated and unnecessary relic from the genre's infancy.  I guess a potential hurdle is that it's probably much easier for developers to cram a game full of WoW-style level grind than it would be to offer varied, compelling things for the character to do, but someone's got to try this out, eventually.

            Considering I'm still on my first talking point, this post is turning out to be far longer than I was expecting.  So I think I'll chop it up into several, assuming of course that the one person who follows this blog actually wants to hear more of my ramblings on what I think would make an excellent MMO.