Category Archives: Game Design

I wish we could be friends

The other night, I found myself dancing frivolously next to a Tauren at the Eventide bank in Dalaran, laughing and cheering. Obviously we were both bored out of our wits, which happens more frequently to players these days, and as we were both wearing our special pre-Cata event costumes it seemed like a fun thing to do. At this occasion I’d like to say once more that the Darkspear Pride is possibly a million times cooler than the Gnomeregan one. Yeah I know, I chose the wrong faction.

That little, silly intermezzo lasted 5 minutes before the Tauren warrior /waved a goodbye at me, disappearing. And I couldn’t help but feel a little sad about the fact that the Alliance and Horde are doomed to never be able to communicate or interact any more in WoW than in such fleeting moments and gestures. I never felt that Blizzard did a particularly great job with their faction model and the language barrier is one big part of that. So I’m supposed to hate the Horde, I got that….wait, why is that again?

Good vs. Evil in MMOs

Unlike Ferrel from Epic Slant I don’t believe that division is a bad thing in MMOs; I think we both agree though that it is mainly about how you approach such division in games. I’m all for a little conflict and I believe there’s a lot of potential in implementing opposing factions of “good” and “evil” in a game – it’s a driving force of the fantasy genre after all. However, the way Blizzard tried to manage this in World of Warcraft is one of the great examples of how not to do it. I was always baffled at the parallel society the Horde and Alliance form in the game, with hardly any interaction besides some forced outdoor PVP zones, battlegrounds and arenas and no relevant impact whatsoever on the world we all play in. I don’t think most of us care whether our enemy in a BG is horde or alliance at this point and that kinda proves my point.

If you want to include the element of ethos in a game, you need to establish things like freedom of choice, consequence and impact. Players should become good or evil, because they choose to play the game in a certain way, taking different paths that will impact on the world they play in and on their own character’s development as a whole. Fable has managed this in a rather nice way in 2004, whereby every player starts the same way and chooses his own path from there. Your character’s playstyle will influence future choices, quests and even your looks will adapt to how you play. The world around you will offer different options and consequences depending on whether you’re of noble or foul spirit.

All that WoW does for me on the other hand, is say “here’s a Tauren, now hate him” – without any immediate motivation or reason for me to do so. It’s actually quite racist if you think about it: I’m supposed to hate another player not because he did something evil in my time, but because somebody else tells me so or because it’s written in some old lore of the game. I’m not sure I want to play a dickhead like that to be honest (which the Alliance already appears to be according to WoW lore).

If you want players to pursue each other with a passion and fuel the fire of conflict in your game, there needs to be a clear and immediate motivation for that. This you can only achieve by letting all players, independant of more cosmetic factors like race, choose how to play the game and installing different paths, rewards and restrictions from there accordingly. In Ultima Online for example, the game would flag players gone rogue in different colors (for example after killing other players) for a set duration, depending on which your options in the game would change. Entire guilds would be created around protecting yourself from criminals on whom you could set bounties in cities. Criminals would in return form bands and while the game would punish them (for they would be pursued by city guards), there was still incentives to go red, for example lootwise.

PVP is not the only option

I think UO showed one of the more “authentic” and open approaches to conflict in a fantasy MMO; there were regulations but there was still a lot of freedom of choice and the element of chaos. Most will agree that this is preferable to pure racial conflict whereby enemies cannot even communicate. Stark images of trying to talk to my cats come to mind when gestures and sounds are all I have to communicate with the Horde. And I have a very hard time hating animals.

Even if you loathe any form of PVP action in online games, there are better ways to manage conflict than how we’ve seen it done in WoW so far. The problem with places like Halaa in Nagrand for example, was that nobody actually cares that much to capture the place repeatedly.

We need choices for good and evil in a game, incentives and rewards and we need them to impact on the world we play in. If I’m supposed to hate or fear somebody, it should be because he did something to deserve that – dancing in front of a bank with me, even dancing badly, doesn’t exactly qualify.

I don’t know what future MMOs will do about ingame conflict but I’m looking forward to new concepts.

Is WoW too polished to be hardcore?

I think everyone agrees that if there’s something Blizzard achieved to deliver with World of Warcraft, it’s polish. It’s what sets the game apart from all the other MMOs out there that are really lacking in one way or another, turning off bigger audiences in the process. And it’s not surprising that polish is so hard to find in this particular genre: MMOs are huge and much less defined and restricted than other, normal games of a specific genre. It’s not so hard to add polish to a shooter that’s supposed to offer its players approx. 50 hours of gameplay fun. Polishing entire worlds that gamers are supposed to enjoy and practically “live in” for years, well, that is another matter. And let’s not even talk about the server-side of things.

So I give Blizzard a lot of props here. You don’t tear your hairs out because game controls are frustrating the hell out of you in WoW. You don’t take hours to get used to some totally unintuitive and inflexible UI and dysfunctional menu features. From there it goes on to things like gear, level and dungeon progression, stat balancing, difficulty levels etc. etc….the required maths behind an MMO could fill a library of books. And even when it comes to class balance WoW does a better job than the competition; even if there’s no perfect class balance, you can still run most dungeons and raids with various group compositions and you can PVP with every class in a way that would be impossible in most other games. Class balance is a horribly tricky and controversial thing to manage in any MMO, especially if there’s both PVE and PVP content to balance.

Too polished to be hardcore?

There’s been voices in the WoW community for some years now asking for a more “hardcore gameplay” approach, whatever that means. Personally I’ve always avoided the term “hardcore”, I find it rather silly in connection with WoW. I also don’t know that I necessarily agree that WoW should be more hardcore in the way I understand the term. I would like to see certain features or things handled differently in WoW, but when I talk about the quality of challenge in the game for example, I don’t associate that with being hardcore. It’s a very ambiguous term that gets used as synonym to anything between ‘hard’, ‘challenging’, ‘elitist’ or ‘exclusive’, even if these things are far from synonymous.

The other day I came across a post by Tony Ventrice from Gamasutra, while reading an article over at Church of Pangoria (thanks btw!). I find it an excellent read that manages to define the term “hardcore” as the rather lacking and blurry attribute I perceive it to be. He also distinguishes the term from other qualities it is often mixed up with it in respective discussions (much to my own discontent):

Six things that make a game hardcore:

Difficult controls

Overwhelming options

Prerequisite knowledge

Abstract memorization

Unclear goals

Unclear solutions

Six things that do not make a game hardcore:

Challenge

Trial and Error

Strategy

Theme

Repetition

Depth / Graduated objectives

If you care to visit the article, you will find further explanation of each of these terms. I cannot but agree with Tony about his distinctions and I find them very revealing in regard to whether WoW should be more “hardcore”. Many qualities that some veterans associate with a hard game or challenge, are actually that: features of a broken game. Annoying controls, unclear goals or directions, an over-kill of meaningless choices, low user-friendliness or accessibility are signs of lacking game design. Signs of a lack of polish. They are not remnants of some romantic time when games were harder in a good, challenging way, they were only really annoying. It also stands to question how beating a broken game makes you an “elite/hardcore” player and why it should be a good thing for any MMO to only attract those few exceptionally stubborn exponents.

I’ve played a lot of the early games on Atari ST or NES and I didn’t find the parts that were broken and full of glitches particularly fun. No, I do not want WoW ever to lack that polish. I think a good game is a game that knows how to balance all things, staying between “hardcore/broken” and “casual/too easy” (yes, I know ‘casual’ can also have different meanings).

That’s also why I thank Tony for listing those features that I am personally so eager to see changed in future MMOs among his second “list of 6”: I do think there’s areas in WoW that should be more challenging or “harder” and Blizzard can learn from the past in a productive way. But re-defining or re-designing what constitutes “challenge”, “strategy”, “theme” or “depth” in a game should never have to do anything with being hardcore (or casual). It’s simply about different ways to approach an audience with the potential to make games more fun and rewarding – for everybody.

“Hardcore may be a badge of honor amongst dedicated gamers but, as more and more people play games, it’s worthwhile to reevaluate our assumptions. How many hard-core tropes build honest challenge and how many are simply lazy design that alienate market share? The casual space may have much to learn from its predecessors, but that’s not to say it doesn’t have a few important lessons to impart of its own.” [T.V.]

I couldn’t word it any better. And to answer my own question: Yes, WoW is too polished to be hardcore and it always was, fortunately! Now let’s focus on the real challenges.

What’s your favored loot distribution?

Gear and tier sets especially, are a big deal in World of Warcraft. We’ve seen Blizzard continuously reform their loot system for raiding sets since vanilla WoW, sometimes with better or worse outcome. I always found the tier distribution a fairly tricky topic, with potential for juicy drama.

Cataclysm will once more reform the way players gain their tiers and apparently Blizzard aims for more identification again whereby certain items are clearly associated with boss loot tables. They also want epic gear to be “truly epic” again. Whatever that means.

But if we were the ones to call the shots, what system would you personally opt for? This is what we’ve had in the past:

Bosses drop slot-specific tier items randomly for every class: this is more or less what we had in Vanilla WoW whereby a certain boss drops the tier legs for every class randomly. If you got no use for the item, it gets sharded.

Bosses drop slot-specific tokens randomly for every loot-group: representative of TBC, Lady Vashj would for example drop the head-slot T5 token randomly for loot-group A, B or C. No more shards, instead more gear for off-specs in the raid.

Bosses drop tokens that are neither slot-specific, nor class/loot-group specific: this was done via trophies for T9 in the Trial of the Crusader (Coliseum) raid instance in WotLK.

Bosses drop non-slot-specific tokens randomly for every loot-group: a mixture of the two previous loot distributions which we have seen in Ice Crown Citadel in WotLK.

Me, I have mixed feelings about it. I would definitely never ever want to see loot-groups again because that particular system is a real can of worms. My own guild was stuck with some really foul loot-luck in the priest/paladin/warlock loot-group for several weeks in the past, while at the same time the “pink-whites” (as I call the priest loot-group) made up more than half of our most active raiders roster at that time.
It does not only get very tense during raids when mages and DKs (who in our guild were more or less alone in their group) start collecting off-spec tiers while your 10+ pink-whites in the raid still sit on 1 tier each, but it hits guilds the wrong way as a whole. Especially nowadays when Blizzard themselves want guilds to bring the player instead of the class and we got all sorts of very different raid setups in every guild; we were often very low on druids, shammies, warlocks and rogues for example, with sometimes three times as many priests and paladins to make up for it.

Your most active raiders might belong to the unlucky (or simply over-sized) loot-group and there’s nothing you can do to gear them up, while the rest is forced to collect offspec-gear because you can’t shard tokens. At the same time you will have to deal with the inflation of DKP for those that cannot bid even if they’d really love to.
And personally, as a very active priest healer, I was rather frustrated that I paid 200 DKP for a T8 token that went for 15 DKP in other groups, because this forced me to save on other slots like rings, trinkets etc. where I couldn’t compete against those anymore that got their tiers so cheap. All you can do in such a situation is to say “sod tiers, I’ll get everything else first and the tiers last”, but that is only so much fun.

I actually loved Trial of the (Grand) Crusader exactly for this reason: finally all raiders had an equal chance on tier loot and the distribution was very mixed and even, even if the most active raiders might finish a little sooner (and there’s really nothing wrong with that). There was no tension anymore and we could actually focus on other things rather than rolling our eyes in advance over what the boss might drop.

The only thing I missed about the trophies was that a certain item could not be associated with a respective bosskill no more: I like the fact that gear tells a story. I’d like to see some of the raider’s or raidguild’s achievements or their current state of progression on the player. I think we lose a bit of content-depth without this. So ideally, I’d like the opposite of what was done in ICC: slot-specific tokens yes, class/loot-group specific no. You can still associate the item with a boss if it goes into a defined slot.

Do I think tokens as a whole are a good idea? I can see why you would dislike them: how “realistic” (fantasy-speaking) is it that a mob carries generic raider-tokens around, rather than just gear? Not very much. Gear has the one advantage that you can produce shards for the guildbank if nobody needs the item. Tokens have the advantage that your raiders can gear up their secondary spec (depending on how you handle this, but there’s little point in trashing tokens).

There’s certainly pros&cons to every loot system, and I guess some of us would even love to see something entirely different for WoW. I’ve never been invested in endgame raiding à la WoW in other MMOs, so I can’t draw comparisons there, but I’m sure there’s some interesting, different concepts around.

What is your favored loot distribution? And do you see an issue in tokens and badges?

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Or: the fastest way to rekindle your WoW passion

The good old pre-expansion blues is taking its toll on guilds and WoW players all around the globe. Bloggers struggle to find topics to write about while waiting for new content (or argue a lot more than usual), gamers run the same old 5mans on their alts or hunt for the last achievements they can possibly do. This is the twilight hour of the MMO: the old sun is setting as we wait in darkened shadows holding our breath, longing for the new dawn. But Cataclysm is still a good 2 months away, if we want to believe the optimistic voices.

For some it’s been too long a wait already. They take their leave from the game or website communities, some to take a hiatus, others with the firm intention never to return. Some question if they still got any future in the world of warcraft.

Well I have good news for you: if you feel your passion for the game dampened, if you doubt whether you should even bother to play Cataclysm, there is a very quick way to make up your mind. You can do what I’ve done the past few weeks, if you’re hooked to the genre like I am, knowing that you’ll always want to play an MMO because it’s ruined all the single-player games for you anyway.

It’s simple: go and check out the other MMOs out there. Get a trial subscription or try some of the free MMOs that are supposedly “not too bad”. There is NO better way to rekindle your WoW spark than by looking at what alternatives the market has to offer you.

Believe me when I say I’ve tried

The past few weeks and months, I have tried, tried real hard too, to give another MMO a chance. Even if I’ve played and loved WoW since the beta launch, I am not a fanboy, I’m generally equally positive as I am critical of the game which makes it hard for more extreme Nay-sayers or Yes-sayers to place me. I don’t love WoW unconditionally, I have too many comparisons for that. It’s still the best game I ever played and the one that has changed me the most, so that counts for something. I can discuss pros and cons of games in a dispassionate manner and I am open to new things. I am also frankly bored of WoW, so I took some time browsing general MMO sites and talked to friends to make my picks.

The games I eventually opted for were Allods, Age of Conan, Everquest 2 and Rappelz. I also meant to try FF14 at some point but alas, that ship has sailed. I intended for a mix of MMOs that complement my previous experiences and chose some of the more popular ones as much as a few free games with a small, die-hard player base. I’m not a big fan of micro-transaction MMOs but I’m still interested to see what some of them have to offer in return.

It was a dizzying and ultimately enlightening journey through the jungle, or should I say “Black Morass” of the MMOs out there. Not that I expected much in the first place, but there were a few surprises along the way, even if the painful experiences outweighed the positive. I am fully aware that I am not the most forgiving customer: if you have a strong WoW background, you’re basically spoiled, you take a lot of features for granted. Many of these MMOs have got between 50’000-100’000 subscribers. For 2010, EQ2 is said to sport approximately 200’000 and AoC around 160’000. That means the vast majority of MMOs has plus-minus 1% of the player base that Blizzard can work with.

My final judgment can still only be from a very personal and biased viewpoint. This is how new MMOs will have to convince new customers to switch over – they will be measured by what’s considered a standard in 2010+. They don’t have to be perfect and they don’t have to copy WoW (they shouldn’t, in fact), but they will have to deliver good reasons to play them instead of WoW. They will have to deliver a ‘package’, because that is what Blizzard really achieved: neither the best graphics, nor the most content depth, nor the best or most complete features, but A LOT of everything! It’s a well-rounded and coherent world we play in, with a high playability and variety that caters to more than one or two types of gamers. Even if it’s not perfect in every respect, it still achieves to be good or very good in most. When we criticize WoW, we’re criticizing on a very high level.

So I’m not gonna be particularly forgiving or aim for completeness and fairness when presenting my experiences. I’ll be short (kinda..) and selective in retelling what impression the games I picked made on me during my very first hours of gameplay, because that’s when most of us decide to continue or not. The average MMO player does not grind his way up in hope for entirely different or better endgame and that’s usually not what you’ll find anyway. I am also personally not so interested in the endgame raiding aspect anymore, like I used to be. I’ll try and be specific about why I stopped in each game’s case.
(Continue reading via the link below)
The Good…

As mentioned earlier, I was positively surprised once or twice during my ventures, namely by Age of Conan and Allods Online.

Allods
Like Rappelz, Allods is a gpotato deal. I chose to play it because it’s a rather remarkable WoW clone graphically and I was intrigued about the Russian team behind it. As expected the game has huge polish from the second you enter the character creation screen. I loved the style of the different races and even if Allods looks a lot like WoW, it shows originality in character design and other cosmetic aspects like armor and world atmosphere. I absolutely loved the Arisen, this gotta be the coolest race ever! You start your journey in a sort of intro scenario, fighting your way out of your homebase and the game controls are easily handled and intuitive.

That’s when the grind begins…..you keep doing the same fetch&delivery quests we got bored of in vanilla for a very long time and combat is slow. At some point, even though this is one of the best free MMOs out there, you ask yourself “why am I doing this?”. Why play an MMO that looks like WoW when you can play WoW without the micro-transaction deal and in the company of a lot more people?

Allods doesn’t only look good, but managed to copy many good aspects of other MMOs while still retaining its own style and unique feel. It runs smoothly and should appeal to a more mass market audience. But it ultimately fails to deliver enough reasons to switch over from WoW. Also, most gamers want to pay subscriptions rather than dabble around with ingame shops all the time.

Age of Conan
While Age of Conan drove masses of players away at its launch in 2008, Funcom have continuously improved the game since then. I spent several weeks playing (and paying) it, before I rested my lvl 60 priest for good. AoC manages to provide you with a coherent world and lore like WoW does, with its unique style and graphics that succeed to create an immersive atmosphere of High Adventure set in the more barbaric and rough world of Conan (there will be blood!). After a very elaborate character creation, your journey begins with your character washed up at a shore, trying to remember his past from there. You’ll spend your first 20 levels more or less following your own ‘destiny quests’ before you get tossed out into the actual world. The zones are beautiful and of an epic scale, I loved exploring while listening to some of the wonderful tunes. The pseudo real-time combat is fast (especially for melee) and the solo features in the game are great.

I had a good time with AoC, but I was surprised at how little care was given to the UI and controls which are highly inflexible. Features like the clunky quest log and grouping tools make it very hard for beginners to find their way around. I was also baffled that an MMO wouldn’t even bother to provide you with proper friendlist functionality. The skills and talent system are rather complex and it took some reading up to work out specs.

But these are things I can deal with. What really discouraged me and my friends from playing together, was the horribly imbalanced group mechanics and at stages dubious difficulty levels for certain dungeons or zones. It was impossible to group up without an exact number of people and classes present (even for dungeons you should out-skill) and once you managed to find the right pugs to join you, it still ended in a very frustrating experience. The tanking mechanics are supposedly better at max level, but aggro control and CC are hideous when trying to level or pug. And while the healing approach in AoC is really refreshing to a WoW healer, it leaves you tearing your hair out due to the broken group mechanics and balance. Apparently this is also a big issue on the PVP side of the game.

So while AoC is possibly the most mature and unique MMO besides WoW and should cater to a more grown-up audience too, it is not quite there yet. The good aspects outweigh the bad, but it’s still a trade-off in parts. I might re-visit it at some point though.

…the Bad…

Rappelz
Rappelz is one of many asian, free MMOs that regularly pops up in respective top 3s. While the overall graphics and character design look okay (if not slightly hermaphrodite) compared to others, the world and game play are horribly stale. The maps are boring and the music is either dull or annoying. That’s just the more superficial aspects of a game but they shape your first impressions nonetheless and are rather significant when it comes to atmosphere and immersion.

The game play does nothing to improve things: you start grinding your way into the first town with two basics skills on your hotbar. 10 levels later, you’re still grinding boring mobs on a boring plain, pushing the same two buttons (attack and smite, yay!). When you finally get to ‘upgrade’ your talent tree and chose a more individual skill path, you get rewarded with a shocking number of 0 new skills or abilities. I kept going until I received my first supposed ‘elite-quest’ and went all “Yay, finally a challenge!”, looking for a group because the NPC told me I’d need one. On my way to find people, I accidentally killed a mob which turned out to be the ‘elite mob’ for my quest…

But that wasn’t the worst about Rappelz, really. The worst is the controls: no mouse-control or WASD, Rappelz is one of the CLICKY-games! If you want to move your character, point and click the environment is all you’ll get. It annoyed me no end and I cannot fathom why some devs still think this is a good idea in an MMO – gawd what were you thinking??!

…and the Ugly

Everquest 2
EQ2 marks my grande finale. I am still utterly baffled about those that told me EQ2 was “that other game beside WoW” or allude that it’s somehow similar. Now I’ll be fair and say the free-to-play feature of EQ2 is currently in its beta but still, the game was released in 2004! That makes it as old as WoW maybe, but definitely not as good.

Yeah I care for things like character creation and looks, you know what, it matters! And EQ2 is HIDEOUS!!! I went temp-blind trying to customize one of the TWO available character models for humans and apparently they’re one of the more agreeable races. Seriously Sony, seeeeeeriously??

Maybe I shouldn’t have chosen the green-violet starting area of the silly fairies, but the optic aspects of the game didn’t improve from there. At least you can run the game smoothly, even after you fought and scrolled your way through the gazillion available ingame menus and submenus to max performance. The gameplay wasn’t so bad, it was easy enough to find your way around the UI and first quests which are rather similar to WoW; the beautiful zone map (…) assists you there. Also, EQ2 makes up for all the skills and abilities Rappelz is so reluctant to distribute: for every level gained, you get at least 2 new spells for your hotbar. At level 14, I was already half-way to filling my 3rd, losing track quickly of what each of those buttons do and when I should use which and why. The skill and talent system is equally confusing: 3 different tabs on ‘alternate advancement’ that give you no hint whatsoever on where to start, while the game keeps reminding you that you got unused skill points lying around!

The game is kinda big for letting you know stuff like that…It also tells you that your two bags are full, after which you will have no peace and won’t be able to loot anything until you found the one vendor NPC that lets you sell trash items. You’ll have to make your way there at reduced speed because apparently walking gets harder after you picked too many flowers and mushrooms.

And then there’s that pesky annoyance of a pop-up that you’ll get to click away every 10minutes, telling you to upgrade to the game’s “silver version”. Apparently that’s Sony’s subtle way of encouraging their free-version players and trialists to buy the upgrade. I’m sure that works really well……not.
There’s actually a GOLD version popup following that silver one, I hear!

If you’ve played WoW for years and decide to test EQ2 nonetheless, I wish you good luck. At least you won’t have to wait for a long install and patching procedure, because the game is smart enough to download most of its ugly maps while you’ve already started playing. That is, if you can get the launcher to run without issues, depending on your windows version. ^^

A look ahead

I give every game a chance but I’m merciless if it manages to annoy me already at the start, fails to meet the most basic standards or doesn’t manage to motivate long term game play after several hours. If you want to hook players or lure them over, you better create some motivation quickly! I don’t think I’m harsh, but I got a clear focus on things like overall atmosphere, coherence and playability when having my first look at an MMO. After that, I’d like a new title to feature something unique instead of just copying WoW: it’s not enough to be as good, you’ll need to be better and different! Try and excel where WoW is lacking, have a good look at how the fathers of the genre created content depth. And make sure you’ll deliver a package, because you’ll be dealing with WoW players with a low tolerance for bullshit.

I would love to give another game a go but looking around, I doubt 2011 will change a lot. Very few games of the past years have shown promise, but they aren’t quite there yet. I have the same feeling about upcoming titles such as SWtoR or The Secret World, even if I’m probably going to look into the latter.
However, most of the current MMOs out there, free or sub-based, are a waste of space, time and nerves. It’s something Blizzard ultimately benefits from, aside of WoW being the king of MMOs for many other reasons.

Before I agree to settle for less, look like some ugly hobbit on steroids or move my character around like a unit in some freakin RTS, I pre-order my Cataclysm copy and let it be known: it’s not perfect, but it’s definitely your best bang for the buck folks!

Why do you play another race in MMOs?

Following several discussions on ‘gnome representation’ in WoW the other week, I ended up noticing how different some MMO players choose what race to play from myself. Since it was gnomish debates that got me thinking about this, I’ll take the gnome race in WoW as an example:

I would never roll a gnome in WoW. And while I agree that the gnomes are rendered somewhat goofy and ‘a-sexual’ (or childish) in this particular game, that has nothing to do with it. Even if gnomes were testosterone- and estrogen-pumped starlets of human sexuality, I wouldn’t roll one (or rather that would be one more reason not to roll one). And I actually think gnomes are awesome, some of my alltime favorite NPCs are gnomes and I’ve loved the whole theme of gnomes as tinkerers and engineers introducing more ‘modern’ technology (steam-engine zeppelins!) to the fantasy genre, ever since Mount Nevermind of the Dragonlance series back from the 1980ies.

But no, I would never roll a gnome, no matter how cool and fun they are. I wouldn’t roll a dwarf either, nor a nightelf or any other race for that matter, simply because I don’t feel “represented” by them. In almost every given MMO I’ve played for longer in the past, I have played a human female if such was possible. I need to identify with the character I play – I am that kind of player. Now I know that race and looks are very superficial and cosmetic: if I was to chose the WoW race that is most likely “like me” in humor or lifestyle (the way it’s presented by lore or NPCs), I would probably roll a troll. But then I don’t care so much about lore and NPC representation; I believe that my char is more of a vessel that’s gonna get its personality from me, if that makes sense. The way I’m playing MMOs, my character is just a projection of my real self and so I will fashion my ingame looks after the real thing if I can. All the Syls in the past, be it in Final Fantasy Online, Age of Conan, WoW or some other MMO, have had the same hairstyle, color, complexion, height (if available) or whatever other cosmetic aspect. I am also rather particular about my ingame name like that.

Am I just boring?

I bet there’s a fair few of you thinking now: Wow, how boring! And in a way I agree, it IS really boring, isn’t it? Maybe if I played alts (which I don’t), I would roll another race, I have mules in WoW that are grumpy dorfs or dashy nightelves after all, it was fun to create them. But the character I mean to play and spend most of my ingame time with needs to be “me”. Identification is closely linked to immersion and immersion in MMOs is a very big deal to me.

So, I realize that we do not all pick our characters in the same way; there are many WoW gamers that choose races like gnomes and nightelves (or horde races) exactly because they like to play someone else in a game. And I can totally understand that – it’s fun to assume a different race, it’s a change from being a “boring human” all the time, right?

It just doesn’t work for me that way. I “like being myself” as silly as that sounds and what I’m looking for in MMOs is taking myself into fantastic realms that I can share with others. And different races are so very much a part of that experience for me too: what would the fantasy genre be without them? I love racial diversity, I’m just not looking for escapism from myself when I pick my character. Maybe that’s self-fixation, or narcissism if you will, I certainly wouldn’t call it race-fixation however. What I like too about this, is that when I look back on my past ventures in all the MMOs I’ve played, it feels like the same character, me, has journeyed through all of them which makes my experiences and memories feel much more like a consistent story (and humans are usually always available as a race choice).

Coming to think of that, I feel this is mostly important to me in MMOs where we are so deeply invested in our alter egos: I have played a lot of Japanese console RPGs when I was younger and as the hero was usually set there, I’d be a male teenager called ‘Ryu’, ‘Link’ or ‘Crono’ (sleepy head!) without experiencing any loss of story because of it.
Still, if I am able to choose, I will always choose to play a female character and most likely a human. If an MMO featured male characters only, I probably wouldn’t play it. It’s why we get so much character customization in this particular genre of games: our alter egos are our avatars, our manifestations and developers account (sadly in various degrees) for this demand for customization which is all about identity and individuality. That said, I would draw the line at playing human models that look simply hideous for the same reasons and I’d choose to play an Arisen in Allods (for reasons of awesumness).

So I wonder, how is it for those WoW players that have been running around as shorties, elves, tauren or trolls for years? Did you instantly identify with your character, no matter how different it looked from you? Or do you feel some of the non-human races of WoW actually represent you a lot better?
Or is this maybe not what you’re looking for at all, are you looking to role-play in a way (not in the sense of you rolling on an RP server), getting some time off the real me?

Why do you play another race in MMOs?

I’d really love to hear some views on this and whether I am the only person playing a human character for reasons of identification and immersion.

We remember the hard times

Lately there was quite a bit of discussion on gend……..errr, I mean, there was quite a bit of discussion going on about where the MMO genre is going and also, about people being bored silly with WoW while being unhappy with the increased “dumbing down” of the game by Blizzard these past few years.

I’ll admit that I am one of those that have an issue with the continuous ‘casualization’ of WoW; not because I need to feel so l33t over more casual players and think they shouldn’t experience the same content as I do, but because I feel a sharp loss of ‘authenticity’ and immersion as a consequence of the related changes since WoW launched in 2004. And I don’t label myself an elite player, far from it.

I am not going to pink-glass vanilla WoW here: there was certain imbalances and unnecessary downtimes that were plain annoying and I wouldn’t want those back. However, I feel that Blizzard’s increased endeavor to make the game more and more accessible and easy to play for a mass market audience, ever since halfway through TBC, has killed a lot of what I consider the ‘soul’ of the true MMORPG experience. A topic that has possibly echoed most of my own feelings in brilliant detail was Wolfshead’s article on EQ3 and the future of the genre in general.
Was everything better back in the days? No. Neither was everything worse. It is rather depressing that oldtimers like Everquest and Ultima Online are still regarded as the games with the most content depth and immersion in the MMO genre up to this day.

When I think of how 5mans are being run in WoW nowadays, it seriously makes me cringe. While it’s far from being my only issue, I think it serves as a good example: queue up for an instance, wait a few minutes, zoom into some cross-server party of which hardly anyone will even say ‘Hi’ in partychat, steamroll the instance, cash your badges and leave, rinse and repeat – it’s like the zombie hour of MMOs.

People don’t speak to one another. And if they do, it’s most likely about gearscore or damage meters.

People don’t die anymore. And if they do, it is such an unheard of, outrageous thing that the tank and healer are most likely to ragequit after the first wipe because they got NO TIME FOR THIS!

People don’t even need to travel to the instance anymore. And if they did, they wouldn’t notice the world around them and its beautiful maps, because their super-fast epic mount flies at “ludicrous speed” somewhere up in the clouds.

Some bloggers have actually compared this way of gameplay to a “one-night stand”: no emotions involved, get in and out quickly, mutual benefits, no strings attached. And why would you invest anything more on people from different servers anyway? It’s an almost complete anonymity, even if you behave like a stupid troll there won’t be consequences. Just yesterday Grumpy described a very similar atmosphere in WoW’s battleground PUGs where communication and teamwork are at an all time low.

Now you could say “but this is all optional, you don’t need to use the dungeon finder if you don’t wish to play with strangers”, but that’s not it really. You play with strangers in MMOs all the time, it’s kinda the POINT. And whether I use this feature or not, it is there and it does impact on the community (lolz I said “community”) as a whole. It is also just one symptom of a spreading disease – and I’m saying this as somebody that is still in love with the world of Warcraft.

Of value and cost or: heroes and dragons

The underlying issue of most of my own points, but also those of other players, comes down to a strong disparity between effort (or challenge) and reward. The irony in WoW’s case is not that the game is too hard and frustrates players by rewarding them too little, but that it is on the contrary so fast and full of opportunities that you do not feel rewarded anymore, as there is hardly a challenge.
As human beings we attach value in relation to what a certain item costs us – value and cost being two very separate things in this case. If it takes you a long time to gain a reward or if it was hard to obtain and required you to overcome many obstacles, you value your reward more, as part of an accomplishment. Well, there is no accomplishment without a struggle: there are no heroes where there is no dragon.

So, where is the feeling of adventure and achievement in playing the game in its current state? When was the last time you really struggled questing in a new map, calling a friend to aid you? When was the last time you had several corpseruns in a 5man because communication on pulls and CC was so crucial? How much effort went into collecting your current set of gear? I had to think hard – the last time we struggled in a 5man was in Magister’s Terrace back in TBC. The instances in WotLK make me feel a lot of things, but certainly not heroic.

We are currently over-loaded on fast opportunity and reward in WoW, to a point where cooperation and teamwork isn’t a key feature anymore. You can solo and pug your way through almost everything with little struggle, downtimes or consequence. Even if you don’t pug, the low difficulty level itself is detrimental to any team building effect: you build strong teams over struggling together, not steamrolling together!

The fact that rewards not only don’t feel like rewards anymore, but also don’t look very rewarding, is doubly ironic: we all look the same nowadays, no matter how we play the game. Our gear tells no stories anymore. It seems the more we are given, the less we got. And then there are those goons that do not even know (or remember) what a party is and how instances used to be, quitting raids over a few deaths or failing horribly whenever they visit an oldschool instance.

When times were tough and memories were epic

I don’t know about you, but personally I lose all sense of adventure when the co-relation between challenge and reward, need for cooperation and teamwork, fear of death and requirements of for example travel, become so secondary in a game. There are no essential struggles, no moments of big consequence or fear – these factors being of course all co-dependent. WoW feels further and further away from the classic MMORPG experience and there goes my sense of ‘authenticity’ down the drain together with immersion.

In his article Wolfshead compared his experience of playing a (good) MMO with watching a horror movie – I find this quite a fitting analogy. If I play in a fantasy world, I’d like some excitement, some tension and moments of terror. I’d like to be scared, calling on my companions to beat a challenge together. Or in other words, I’d like to run and scream in terror; because fear is part of adventure. What follows after, is an epic feeling of accomplishment, reward and fun shared with those that assisted you – or alternatively a feeling of shame and embarrassment over being such a chicken. It is those moments we remember in MMOs, not the easy kills, not the fast loot: what we remember is the really tough times.

I remember how my guild beat Vaelastraz after weeks and weeks of wiping in BWL, and the tremendous relief we felt to have overcome this obstacle together. I remember being scared shitless trying to cross duskwood as a lowbie, waiting for my party to escort me. I remember endless hours and corpseruns in Stratholme, BRD and UBRS because those instances were actually hard for any group. I remember grinding my way to exalted with goddamn Silithus, which is quite possibly the worst thing I ever did in this game (I have still not quite recovered), but I DID IT!

It is the times of our worst struggles and the feeling of achievement in overcoming them as a group of heroes set in a fantastic and scary world that make our best memories in an MMO. I want more “MMO-RPG” and less fast food, please. I want times to be tough and adventures to be epic!

I want memories that last.