This thought came to me as I’ve been playing MMO’s this week. MMO’s are just too easy these days. We see a mob and we don’t even worry about whether or not we can kill it. We know that if it is in the same area as us that it must be relatively doable. When we find a mob that we want to kill, even if it has a friend or two nearby, we just pull or run right in. 99% of the time we win. That’s very different from how it used to be not too long ago. In EQ the mobs had to be con’d and then an analysis of whether or not the type of mob was killable by our class or whether or not this was an even level mob that was really meant for a group encounter. In DAOC mobs brought friends and usually more than one mob solo meant death. In many games you ended up running away to live 20% of the time and you ran at half health instead of just a sliver because you knew fighting the mob that it would be hard. A good example today would be trying to fight a ‘red’ con mob solo — most people feel it isn’t reasonable.
Quest grinds are very indicative of this easy-mode play. It’s easy to give you a quest to kill 20 wolves then give you another to kill 10 boars. It’s easy to just stack you with quests and send you out to do them then expect you to do it all over again. When the game is so easy, it diminishes the value of what you’re doing. You might be in an area that is just amazing looking, but when you’re there for 30 minutes then you leave never to see the place again because you’ve killed your 20 skeletons, what’s the point? Where is the value in that?
Why then are some games better at getting away with it than others? World of Warcraft is a great example if you look at how the quests have evolved over time. Cataclysm quests vs. Vanilla quests are night and day. Vanilla had you kill 10 murlocs. Cataclysm has you taking on the role of quest giver to send NPC’s out on quests or riding cars and delivering sodapop or seeing areas change with phasing technology based on your progress. If it’s easy, it has to be interesting! If you’re going to go someplace once and be there for 30 minutes max then at least make that experience memorable. If I go to this castle and kill undead then it either needs to be hard and involved, or easy and different enough to be memorable. I remember Vanguard’s Renton Keep because it was difficult and a group was really needed to explore into this outdoor area. I remember even the newbiest of areas in DAOC because the mudmen in Hibernia came with 30 friends if I wasn’t careful enough. I don’t remember generic experience X of killing 10 boars in LotRO… or I do for the wrong reasons.
The days of difficult content might be over, but there’s really no excuse for generic content anymore.
Can’t we have difficult and interesting content?
I know, I know, ‘Accessible’ is all the rage at the moment. No child left behind and all that carry on.
They totally need to have an MMO difficulty setting ala most SP games. xD Perhaps just have it done by server ruleset, have easy, normal, hard and AMG-GROUP-FOR-EVERYTHING level servers. Something like WoW probably even has the population to pull it off.
I think it has less to do with the ease of quests. Moreso with how repetitive those quests become. In Ultima Online you didn’t have quests. You had grind. It was really a different kind of game. It was generic and straight-forward, but the reward was skill increases. The knowledge that killing that next Skeleton or Lich might make you a stronger Mage. Or a stronger Fencer. Hell, even a stronger healer.
In today’s games, people don’t find that interesting anymore. However, in essence, it’s still the same. We’ve replaced skill grinding with loot. Mob grinding with questing. When all you had was a mob grind, they had to be difficult to keep you going. It becomes pointless to sit on a mob spawn for hours on end when they pose no challenge. Such is not the same with questing. When you have hundreds or even thousands of quests you can complete, they can’t be overly difficult. People will lose interest.
Sure, they can pose some challenge. Or even ask you to group. However, when you DO have to kill 10 boars.. if each one of those boars feels like a boss.. the flavor of questing dies fast. So yes, with the flavor system of the time it does need to be a little easy. Blizzard did set the bar. However, you have to look at World of Warcraft. How much money have they actually poured into it? It’s not all about the budget, of course, but it IS a limiting factor.
No game can stand up to WoW because no game has the resources that WoW has. They just don’t. That’s why I always stand by what a game can offer. Instead of what someone else offers. If I’m constantly looking at WoW, then no MMO currently released will ever meet my standards.
Ultimately, we don’t need generic questing. I agree 100%. However, we’re also limited by what any one company can actually offer. However, I do think the types of games you’re looking for are on the Horizon. Rift, to name one. Dynamic worlds are the next step. Rift seems to be doing that nicely. You also have to take into consideration something you yourself said. Vanillla was 2004. It’s taken them 6 years to evolve into the monster that they are now.
Asking anyone one company to fly out of the gate with that very same polish, polish and intrigue that even WoW didn’t have at release, is a bit of a stretch. Time will tell, though. Maybe one of the 2011 MMOs will break the mold. Maybe we will finally get a WoW competitor. However, I don’t see it happening. WoW is too big and has been around too long. By reputation alone it will continue to be king and used for comparison until the day it goes down.
I’ll agree with you on the fact that generic content is no excuse these days, however, I do challenge the thought against the ease of content. I remember the old days of running into mobs and getting my ass kicked if i didn’t con them, and I don’t relish them. When we think of Theme Park MMO’s (Like WoW, WAR, etc) it isn’t really the leveling experience that makes the game. Sure, the leveling experience needs to be good so that it keeps you until the end-game, but the content that needs to be difficult needs to be accessible. When you think of challenge in WoW, you know you will find it in a Raid, and that is a mutual understanding to the rest of the players. When you think of the difficulty of random packs of mobs and quests throughout your leveling experience, it can be a wall to your enjoyment. You can find many people looking for a spot in a raid group, but have fun looking for people (all the time) ready to jump in and assist you with a quest or mob. Hell, try to find people your level doing it.
I just want you to know I agree with you, however, I am happy the the leveling experience has lightened up and allows people to focus on learning the game over getting their ass kicked over and over and running out crying. Just compare the numbers between players of the old “tough love” MMO’s versus the newer “have fun” versions and you will see that its a working system.
@Naithin: Oh don’t get me wrong, you can have difficult and interesting I’m just saying that these days it seems difficult is on the way out. I love difficult.
@Shadrah: I agree about the reptition. I should have used that word in my entry as well. Generic and repetitive instead of interesting/difficult/different/dynamic.
@Pepsiest: Easy and interesting is still okay — that’s why I like Cataclysm quests.
Keen, what game were you playing this weekend when this thought sprung to mind? come on…
Also i want to add ease of game and quests etc is also heavily influenced and directly correlated with death penalty or lack of it really. If EQ had WoW’s death penalty think how much easier that game would have been. Sure the mobs are the same difficulty but the fact you dont fear death means you would take unnecessary risks and through shear will and perseverance get things accomplished without repercussion or consequence.
@Romble: Came to mind when playing WoW. I’ve played a lot of games this weekend though that added to this thought. The death penalty is definitely a part of it.
Is it really difficult or just time-consuming though? Do they equal the same thing?
I played Wurm Online the other day, tried to dig a hole, took 4 hours getting my dig skill up from 1 to 8, and ended up with a slight dip in the ground. Since watching progress bars churn is relentlessly boring, most of the time was spent in the other window racing through brain-turned-off WoW quest hubs having an cinematically entertaining undead experience.
But Wurm players tell me that the length of time to change anything is what makes it ‘significant and meaningful.’ It is the realism (read time-consuming nature) of the simulation that makes Wurm great. Or is persistent terraforming the real feature?
I played Minecraft for 4 hours, and dug a HOLE in the ground. Or a 20x20x10 cavern rather, which was then dressed up as an underground tree farm with crops, irrigation channels and skylights.
That was relatively quick, full of complexity and emergent properties, but was it difficult? I’d have to say no, unless the difficulty is coming up with the creative idea in the first place.
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If one has to con a mob before killing it each time, is that just one more unnecessary step?
If differently mobs were mixed up in the same zone, does it add anything to difficulty, or does it just force people to run for long periods of time to get to each mini-area of appropriate level?
What factor are we looking for, when we say we want difficulty? Are we looking for tactically challenging while in combat (in which case, limited skill bars and proper timing in use of skills might be what to look for)… or additional time-consumption to add to a sense of immersive ‘realism’ in order to simulate a world? Or did we want complexity and emergent properties? Or meaningful choices?
Or do we just want to get beat up by mobs 4 out of 5 times and come back later after gaining 10 levels to beat them up in revenge? Or instead of the level gain, bringing 3 friends. Or coming back with better chosen skills.
Difficulty is one thing… but what the solution to the difficulty is… changes the tone of the game.
The whole point is changing the tone of the game. There are quest grinds that are meaningless and simply exist to level you up. You do generic content that isn’t memorable for what? Usually people don’t even know why they mindless do the repetitive quest grind. When what you do can be thought through and strategized or fun because it isn’t repetitive then the game becomes more of an experience.
City of Heroes already found a viable solution via a difficulty slider, we just have to implement it in a way that doesn’t rely on instancing.
A possible way is to over multiple zones for each level range. Upon leaving the newbie zone, an NPC will describe the next zones you can enter and the threat they pose. The only downside to this is that developers have more zones to craft.
Another option is to have NPC offer the player to take a burden. It may involve wearing a curse amulet or suffering a nasty spell effect. When the player engages a mob, the mob will check for said curse or spell and use or refrain from using powerful spells on the player depending on whether or not they took up the burden.
I’ve always wondered why we can’t just have server difficulties. Easy, Medium, Hard, and maybe even an Insane. Then let players play where they want. No character transfers up the ladder, only down.
Cataclysm is going to be a lot of fun. Challenge will hopefully come in the raiding. It does feel a lot like just treading MMO-water waiting for a “real MMO” to come out tho. There’s a lot of us who want challenge and strategy, who want skill to matter. I have faith it’ll happen in time. Eventually everyone tires of themeparks.
@Lee Me too! This endless mithering on about “too easy” “too hard” is completely unecessary. Let the user set the difficulty level.
Also there is a huge divide between “Gamers”, who make up the great majority of MMO bloggers and posters, and “hobbyists” who make up the great majority of the players. The MMO companies tell us repeatedly that only a very small proportion of their players ever reach the “Endgame” of their MMOs. They tell us repeatedly that they lose the most new players within the first hour of gameplay.
It’s very hard for Gamers to understand, or empathise, with non-Gamers who don’t find MMOs “too easy” but “really hard to follow” and “confusing” and “a lot of work”. Ten years ago, when the number of MMOs could be counted on both hands and MMO companies were ecstatic to see a couple of hundred thousand people subscribing to their game, they could afford to concentrate on that core audience. Nowadays there are many hundreds of MMOs and many millions of players and there just aren’t enough Gamers to keep that pot boiling.
There should be difficulty settings within MMOs, whether by server, by account, by character, however. There should also be specialists, like Darkfall, like EVE, who don’t court a mass market. There should be more breadth, more depth, more variety. There is no reason why everyone shouldn’t be able to find something to suit their personal preference.
Cough DarkFall cough.
Bart will back me up that mobs in DarkFall are anything but the easymode that is typical among todays MMOs. It’s one of the reasons why I love the game so much.
Might have been due to lack of playerskill, but I felt that Aion was a lot more difficult on that account, it felt refreshing to actually have a challenge when just out XPing for levels as opposed to the nobrainer task of leveling in WoW.
Aion? There was no challenge, it was braindead. They just packed zones full of mobs so you had to have a good puller: Tank, DPS, and Heals were so easy mode it wasn’t funny. Rifting didn’t add challenge, you just got sent back to home point when you were blindsided.
And darkfall is spastic AI, not challenging. FFXI had the best, most challenging mobs in terms of team play. One link at the wrong time would kill your party, and it took skill to heal since each class had limited resources compared to most MMOS. Healers needed to conserve mana, DPS could easily pull hate, Tanks had to deal with mobs that could interrupt and used strong specials, and support needed to be on the ball with spacing and pulling.
As much as it did though, you couldn’t sugarcoat it. People quit FFXI because it was too hard, and it over time retooled itself to become easier. No one quits darkfall because mob AI is too hard. Same with EVE: they quit because PvP is stale and dull. FFXI showed that a lot of people weren’t willing to make that much effort over a game, and considering how many hours I spent in it, they have a point.
thats the main attraction for me in FFXIV. its hard, its really hard. i usually find myself killing the same 2 or 3 monsters in an area out of sheer fear of dying trying to kill something else.
that fear to me, is generating a “true” sense of danger in the world. i never know whats gonna happen until i try it.
this can sometimes lead to frustration but i rather take interesting, danger with some frustration over boring thoughtless repetitiveness with the same old, same old – if you know what im saying.
@Skryre I came here to say the same thing. Although he has probably heard it a hundred times before.
@Dblade The AI does get a bit spastic at low health, but if you were a goblin on the edge of death you might get a bit spastic as well. The real gem behind Darkfall’s AI is it’s interaction with the world around it. Hiding behind a tree near a goblin camp is only safe if they don’t notice any sound or movement in your vicinity. So if you start healing up with a spell they will get curious about the noise and investigate. Similarly, you can get pretty close to a camp by crawling and taking advantage of terrain, but try walking or running and they will see you. Lastly, a Darkfall goblin will call for his buddies or retreat before the typical MMO AI will, and if you don’t plan properly you can end up with a mob descending on you before you realize it. Not to mention a mob running away in Darkfall doesn’t just pick a random direction.
The one thing I did like about BC was random Fel Reavers (I think that’s what they were called). They were huge, powerful, with a menacing roar. They always seemed to sneak up on you (yea I know, not very realistic) during your questing, and it left my brothers and I always questing in a bit of fear. That and the fact there was some pretty good open pvp in the area.
I also loved the few parts of the world in WAR where there was pretty good PvP in quest areas. That I love.
Darkfall did a good job of creating fights where you thought about it for a second before engaging, and even ran away when fights didn’t go your way, a lot better than some of the games released near it.
Aion? Mindless, repetitious, grind.
WAR? Mindless quest grind.
LotRO? Mostly mindless but there were times and places where it was good.
WoW? Mindless at times. Better with each expansion. The fun and ‘different’ factor thrown in to offset it.
I think Darkfall’s sense of fear has less to do with mobs and more to do with players. Even easy mobs instill fear in DF because you were likely to be killed at any time. The game itself didn’t create that atmosphere. The community did. Games will always have a progression ceiling. A point where no mob in the game is any longer a challenge (be it group content or otherwise). Especially in UO-esque games like DF.
WAR’s refeshment was in the form of public quests, and recently added dynamic zones like Land of The Dead. Where you actually could change the zone for the other faction. Most noteably, locking them out. However, it was still an instance. Not open world.
Aion I can’t really speak on. Though, I’ve heard nothing but bad things about it’s leveling content. That it eventually becomes that old “sitting on this mob for a few days” style of leveling. Not for me.
LotRO I can’t really speak on either, but I hear it’s PvE content is one of the best.
WoW is prolly the worst of the examples for just how simple it truly is. Don’t get me wrong, I played for 4 years. I did enjoy it at one time. But it’s a shining of example of difficuly ceilings. The only thing that keeps people going back to WoW is the mini-game feel it offers from time to time. Though, some would argue that that’s what will ultimately bring WoW down. That it’s becoming too easy. Interesting can only take any one game so far.
Generic content aside, difficulty is an odd thing. I know exactly what you mean about ‘conning’ mobs back in the day of EQ. Now we don’t even think about it!
Great article Keen. Games in general are all becoming way too easy, being someone whos played games for a very long time i just cant understand this whole “push X to win” mentality that companies are throwing at us. Why even play a game if it doesnt offer up a challenge that you can overcome with skill?
about WoW quests,
Depends what you define as evolution of quests.
Quests that have nothing to do with the core gameplay are not something that attract me. I have no problem with kill X of Y, it is the game itself and how that happens that should be underlined.
e.g. obtain a normal X of Y quest. Well that simple quest becomes far more interesting when multiple players NEED it (or any other situation built into the game that uses player interactions, etc). Then it becomes much more complex. And I think Blizzard lost that. They simply forgot to balance their game around gameplay and hence jumped to the conclusion that it was the quest structure itself that was the issue and NOT the structure of the game. So instead they create quests that have nothing to do with the MMO or RPG aspects of the genre (a.k.a. meaningless mini-games that don’t involve ANYTHING you have done with your character AND don’t involve other people).
Same concept as those awful MARIO KARTS in PVP battles. They have NOTHING to do with the core of the game or of what the game is meant to be in terms of its genre… Yet they are there?!
To me quest varity is great, IF it had to do with the core of the game. And that core of the game itself has to be good. One of the reasons why WOW got so horrible was because quest varity became ‘mini-games’, hence all randomness that other players could introduce and all other aspects of the MMORPG were removed in favour of horrible mock ups of proper games (e.g. MARIO KART in PVP, if I want to play MARIO KART via shooting bombs that other players, I’d PLAY MARIO KART and not a cheap imitation).
I think through it you can see that Blizzard wishes to not make a MMORPG anymore. That was the original mission… But now that is gone and in the end there is just this empty shell of a game that used to be the genre it still claims it is.
Of course rubbish like Aion or WAR is worse, because the core of the game is that bad. They do not have these player interactions that may affect the core, or as someone pointed out above… “HOLY SHIT IS A FEL REAVER!”
New WoW quests while new in design are still effectively unentertaining and uninteresting. You play a role and you know what the end result will be. There is no risk, nor much else. Much of their new quest design is specifically design to exclude other player interactions or other varibles.
Either way, saying that WoW quests are better then Aion quests is like saying one rubbish is better then the other. Both versions of quests both suck and are so easy because the genre itself is in decline more then anything else. I don’t think anyone should promote the new WoW styled quest designs, because while the old ones are boring at least with an effective core game they can still do well… while WoW Mario Kart quests cannot advance via the core game because they remove the player from the core game. Like someone stated, Darkfall has ye ol’ kill X mobs, yet the mob design and the game design itself is of such difference compared with themeparks that these standard quests are made more interesting/different.
If Darkfall copy/pasted the Mario Kart Quests from WoW, there would be no difference between the two games’ quests. While kill X mobs, there is vast difference.
I remember things not being nearly as easy in Everquest. Some mobs would, and still will, squash you like a bug. Was it any better than doing a fun quest in WoW?
Thinking back on it, I wasted a lot of time looking for groups. Not doing things on my own time at my own pace. I made great friends and that is the main thing I remember positively. Not all the time spend grinding away on ‘hard’ content in a group.
Cant agree more with you man..games are dumbed down to a very big extent. This makes them boring and they wear out sooo fast so whats the point ?? 🙁
they feel almost retarded… anyway i have some hopes for Guild wars 2 and Tera to be pretty cool 😉 lets wait and see
These games need less quests, and rather a single story based quest with multiple stages, multiple solutions and some optional objectives.
Add some cinematic background stuff NPCs vs Mobs (see: WOW) to give it an epic feeling. Something like: Storm the keep and kill the commander, or clear the walls and open the gate, or detonate an explosive device in the basement.
To give it that dynamic world feeling, once its been taken, make the quests change over to defending the keep, with objectives such as: Kill the commander, hold the breach, counterattack. Possibly done with some sort of Public Quest mechanic.
Throw in some optional objectives for more XP/Cash, and the loot reward comes afterwards looting the armory or supply tent, whatever.
The quest should be broad enough to span an entire zone, maybe mixing the factions up similar to WAR did, aka, orks attack dwarfs defend or flipped. On that part, I think WAR did a good job, I think there just needs to be some more cinematic aspects and story aspects to it all. A feeling of accomplishment, and less farm Pigs/skeletons/mushrooms/etc
I don’t disagree that Aion was a mindless repetitive grind when all things are considered, and I’m not talking about group content either (@Dblade), when solo questing I often ran into mobs that where a challenge on their own, if I got two it meant trouble, if I got three it was a disaster unless I could pull a trick out of my ass (which happened, but rarely).
Again it might be that I sucked or that I constantly was running against content meant for higher lvl chars, or that you where trivializing it by grinding too long in each zone making new zone mobs easier for you, but I found it a lot more difficult that WoW and I don’t think anybody can deny that.
@Anne
While I think agree with your sentiment, I disagree with pretty much everything you wrote. Some of those mini games are fun, that is why they are their. People are focused far to much on the fact that every aspect of these MMOs has to adhere to what THEY believe is a core value of a MMO they lose sight of what is fun. Games are designed to make you enjoy your time while playing them.
God forbid the MMO genre evolve. Everyonekeeps rattling their blogger and forum cages about how we’ve strayed from our EQ, UO, and DAoC roots. Those types of MMOs will never see main stream market success again. They are too unfriendly to the players. Like or not, you may as well accept it.
I don’t think what Blizzard has done with the MMO genre is bad. I would like to see more content designed around encouraging a stronger community, but the Dungeon Finder and soon to be Raid Finder are already excellent tools for creating situations where you group with others. The intimacy is partially gone, but that’s because most people don’t want to put in the effort to keep it. On Friday night I kept the same Dungeon Finder group together for 2 1/2 hours, the only reason we split up was because one person logged and we couldn’t kick them after a dungeon or queue with them not online. You can still run dungeons and raids with friends.
The ability for WoW to be a MMO still exists. Most people are simply to lazy to work for it.
I think people that like difficult combat should give Dungeons and Dragons a try. Its still easy to kill most mobs but you get the choice on EVERY quest to do it on solo normal hard or elite difficulty, so it can be as difficult as you want it. The exp and loot scale with difficulty chosen. I think every MMO should have this. It also encourages group play on basically every quest but you can get hirelings if your to lazy to form a group.
The quests also feature sections where you need to use diplomacy skill , multiple adventure path choices in some adventure packs and different speech options. Theres also traps which can 1 shot you on elite and puzzles so its not just straight kill quests and the story is engaging most of the time and its DirectX11. For a F2P MMO i’m really enjoying it.
DDO is probably one of the most under appreciated MMOs I’ve played.
In wow, when you fight mobs, they are cookie cut to fit your level, and every class has been carefully design to have near-zero downtime. the speed of your leveling depends on how fast your cooldowns allow you to press ‘1’.
In DAOC, you had to scout out a good camp with mobs that preferably were weak to your attacks, with a good respawn rate, and few pats.
In wow, i very rarely felt that “danger”, just plow in with the meat grinders and see how many things you can slaughter before bedtime. A few highlights were:
1) The camp west of stonebreaker hold where you have to be disguised and kill certain mobs. It was interesting and fun to pick out your targets while avoiding the big pat around camp.
2) The cave back in where you did the Maxnar Must Die quest. BEFORE they added the quicker respawn it was a 10 minute corpse walk if you died.
3) The elites in HFP and zang were interesting, because often you had to use every trick in the book to take them down (except for hunters and locks).
The lowlights:
Hemet FUCKING Nesingwary
oh and i forgot to add that Wrath was just retarded simple to level up, and there was no interesting leveling except for the occasional cutscene.
DDO felt like Lego Star Wars, run around and smash all the objects in the dungeon for the loot to pop out.
Proximo, I didn’t find it difficult much. I went to each area at the level appropriate time. The only way you and I died was really because Aion had a higher mob density in many areas. None of the mobs themselves seemed that challenging or tough, and I never saw mobs where I needed to vary tactics. Just keep chaining attacks.
It’s easier to describe real difficulty. In FFXI as a beastmaster, that was some hard leveling. Magic Pot enemies had multiple AOE spells that were devastating, taking of half to three quarters of your health if you got tagged. You had to position yourself perfectly to continue to attack while avoiding the aoe centered on your pet.
Sometimes you had to save your TP for a stun to interrupt a spell because your pet couldn’t survive it over the course of a fight. Or you had to know when to disengage and run for the next charmable pet. Even just normal fighting was rough: take too much hate from your pet at the wrong time and you could eat a mob weaponskill and die. Learning how to do this and chain to do decent exp was difficult.
But it was fun. With aion I never got that sense, the whole difficulty was just pulling mobs, and even that was easy mode considering the tank could tractor beam them to their location. The only fun I had in it was main healing in a mau village as a chanter, simply because it forced me to be on my toes since it wasn’t ez mode like the cleric.
Play Darkfall or Eve. Everything else seems easy after those.