Former WoW Dev: "I think we killed a genre."

[Infinitron]

http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/7540/Mark-Kern-Have-MMOs-Become-Too-Easy.html

Mark Kern: Have MMOs Become Too Easy?

Have you noticed the creeping casualness that permeates all MMOs these days? When is the last time you died in a starter zone? What happened to 40 person raids that have dwindled to 5? Do you feel any sense of achievement in the race to end game, or is the end game the only achievement?

It all started with the drive to make MMOs, which in the EQ and Ultima days were a niche and hard core game, more accessible. Accessibility was the mantra when I was leading the World of Warcraft team. We labored over the user interface for the game, going through many iterations, to find one that would be easy and intuitive for players new to the genre. We created a massive number of quests to lead the player through the world, making sure that they never had to think about what to do next.

But even that wasn’t enough. As WoW grew in population, reaching ever more casual gamers, new expansions introduced even more refinements. Quest trackers were added, and xp was increased so that it was easier to level through all the old content to get to the “new stuff” of the expansion. Gear from the a new expansions first quests made raid gear from previous expansions a joke. And the level curve became faster and faster until we reached a point where everyone is just in a race to get to max level, and damn everything else in between. Why care about level 20 gear when you would blow by levels so fast it was obsolete before you even logged off for the night?

And it worked. Players came in droves, millions of them. But at what cost? Sometimes I look at WoW and think “what have we done?” I think I know. I think we killed a genre. There are many reasons I feel this way, but I’d like to discuss one in particular, the difficulty curve.

The main thing we lose when lowering the difficulty curve is a sense of achievement. When the bar is lowered so that everyone can reach max level quickly, it makes getting to max level the only sense of accomplishment in the game. We lose the whole journey in between, a journey that is supposed to feel fun and rewarding on its own. Nobody stops to admire a beautiful zone or listen to story or lore, because there is no time to do so. You are fed from a fire-hose of quests that you feel compelled to blaze through, whose content is so easy and quick to accomplish, that you are never in one place long enough to appreciate the incredible world around you. We feel bored by these quests, simply watching numbers on our quest trackers count down to completion before we are fed the next line of quests. And you don’t feel satisfied from playing the game because it never challenged you.

And since these quests are so easily and quickly accomplished, the developer is not motivated to spend any time creating rich quests or events for players, since they will only be done once and discarded in the blink of an eye. Developers have no choice but to rely on kill 10 rats, fedex or escort for nearly every quest, and to do so with the least amount of work possible, lacking in depth or story. Its simply not worth it to do anything more. This makes the situation even worse, as not only do we not have a sense of accomplishment, but we enjoy these quests chains less and less as they become simpler and more cookie-cutter. The moment to moment gameplay suffers. And its this focus on throwaway quests as “content” that is putting MMOs into a very deep bind.

As content gets easier in order to appeal to a wider market, it at some point also pushes that market away. We feel bored by the same formula over and over. We never explore the world, having been indoctrinated to just follow a laundry list of tasks. There is no thinking, and not much choice, as the ideal path is spoon fed to you in a linear fashion (ironic how open world MMOs have become linear quest fests). It may be great for relaxing and having a fun couple hours of gameplay, but it doesn’t last. No wonder we have such a huge crowd of jaded and bored MMO players. Every MMO that follows the WoW formula is a trivial exercise, dominated by rote and convention, trading off the joy of the journey for a series of meaningless tasks. And when we race to the end, we expect some kind of miracle end-game that will keep us playing. It never does.

It’s not the end game that we should be worried about, its the journey. An MMO should be savored, a lifetime of experiences contained within a single, beautifully crafted world. The moment to moment gameplay should be its own reward. You should feel like you could live your whole life there, not by having infinite quests, but by having a living world that makes you feel good just for being in it and experiencing all it has to offer at your own pace. Its not about the competition to max out your character, its about a way of life and a long term hobby with enduring friends.

In our own game, Firefall, we try to focus on the journey, not the end. We work hard to create a beautiful world, and you never out-level a zone since the dynamic events scale to players. Our quests and missions are dynamic, letting us put more work into making the event fun to do and letting you do it as often as you like and because you are challenged by them. Our combat focus is tuned for skill and moment to moment fun, and because it require dexterity and aiming, you can always challenge yourself to do better. We also have an intricate progressions system, one that focuses on lots of tinkering on the journey to maximizing your battleframes. Our crafting and resource system is one of the deepest and most complex of any MMO, having more in common with the well loved crafting system of the original Star Wars Galaxies than the simplified crafting systems of current MMOs.

Firefall is not a trivialized distillation of an MMO. We found that adding a little difficultly and depth has actually made the game more fun, not less. Maybe, just maybe, as an industry we’ve made things too easy, and its time to get back to games being challenging as well as fun.

 

[Infinitron]

Another good article: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-07-04-have-traditional-mmos-had-their-time

​

Have traditioal MMOs had their time?​

And what do we make of the shared-world games and MOBAs that have risen up to replace them?

Traditional MMOs have gone out of fashion lately. It used to be that every gaming brand had exciting untapped MMO potential and every publisher wanted an MMO in its stable, but the gold rush inspired by World of Warcraft yielded little precious metal, and a lot of publishers got burned in the process - especially Electronic Arts with Star Wars: The Old Republic - while the term "MMO" has become taboo when discussing a new breed of games that includes The Division and Destiny, even though in many respects they are both massively multiplayer and online.

Now it's not MMOs that publishers are in a hurry to stuff into portfolios, but "shared-world shooters" and MOBAs - multiplayer online battle arena games - because everybody wants a piece of those big fat World of Tanks and League of Legends money pies, and it sure doesn't cost as much to bake them.

Is that it, then, for traditional MMOs?

"The traditional MMOs [have] had their time, definitely," Ragnar Tornquist tells me, and he should know. The Secret World, which was a traditional MMO he built at Funcom, launched last year and suffered the same fate as many others: it failed to bring in the crowds and caused serious problems for the company as a result. Tornquist has now left Funcom and let go of his ties to The Secret World.

"I don't see the traditional MMO having much of a chance in the future, but games that bring tons of people together - they're definitely going to exist. So you'll have a subset of it, but I'm hoping it will diversify a little bit more," he elaborates. "Definitely you're not going to have the big subscription-based MMOs any more - those are dead."


World of Warcraft's stiffest competition over the years came recently in the shape of Guild Wars 2, an MMO that challenged conventions and did not require a monthly subscription fee. It's not traditional in those regards, then, but it is traditional in its multi-million-dollar scope, approach and vision. Guild Wars 2 sales sound like they are close to five million and, coincidentally, Warcraft has dropped to its lowest subscriber numbers in years.

"I don't know if [the world has] moved on," Guild Wars 2's lead content designer Mike Zadorojny says, "but definitely the landscape of the industry is changing.

"Traditional MMOs are expensive things to make and it takes a lot of time investment, and it's kind of a risk, kind of a gamble, and it depends on the type of game you build, what your pricing structure is, how much time you put into development and things like that.

"So everyone's trying to find how they can connect with their fans in an engaging and effective manner that's also, because this is a business, in a profitable manner as well. We found our way; the fans have actually been really receptive to what we're doing in terms of our strategies and things like that, and they've supported us through this.

"This is just an evolution of what it means to be part of this industry," he says. "Things are going to change. Some people can find ways to still be profitable with traditional markets or what they are currently doing, but everyone is always going to be looking at what's the next big thing and how is that going to apply to them."

The next big thing in the traditional MMO world is The Elder Scrolls Online, a huge, heavily financed project that's been in development for six years. But has it missed the boat? It's had a rocky reception so far, although its profile rose at E3 with news that it will be on PS4 and Xbox One this coming spring as well as PC.

"It's a very strong IP," says Tornquist, "it's a very strong universe, and if any game can give a little bit of CPR to the MMO genre, that would be it.

"But I'm worried on their behalf. I've seen what a big MMO can do to a studio, and I'm worried that this might be a little bit too much too late. But we'll see."

"We're eyeing it," says Guild Wars 2's Zadorojny, "but we're so focused on the initiatives that we're doing in terms of what we're trying to accomplish that it doesn't really change what our plans are."

Will The Elder Scrolls Online require a monthly subscription fee, even on top of PlayStation Plus and Xbox Live fees? We don't know yet. I hope not. But just as publishers like NCSoft (and hopefully Bethesda) are starting to recognise and react to problems with the World of Warcraft business model, so developers are also starting to take a new approach to the fundamental game design.

Activision and Bungie's Destiny is one of the hot new kids on the block, declining to be known as an "MMO" but rather a "shared-world shooter". It isn't a traditional MMO in the sense of starter zones, fetch quests, raids and so forth, but it is persistent and always online, and it scales from single-player experiences to co-op to multiplayer, match-making behind the scenes. Ubisoft's The Division is an MMO in console clothing in many respects as well, while even Respawn's Titanfall, due to be published by EA, is always online and features persistent elements.

Originating on PC are online multiplayer games like DayZ, a hardcore survival RPG with zombies that, when it was an ArmA 2 mod, rocketed to over a million players in just four months. Now a standalone version is on the way. Then there's Minecraft, a world-conquering phenomenon on a World of Warcraft scale, born on PC. A myriad different worlds/servers hosted by the community exist online, and the scale of some of the communal projects is staggering.

DayZ and Minecraft came from nothing. They were creations of one brain in each case, built quickly and cheaply. They blossomed because they were new, risky and built on the creativity and participation of their players more so than their creators; although they weren't blank slates, they weren't staid, monolithic theme park MMOs trying to please everybody either. They had what came to be acknowledged as a tightly focused appeal, despite their many players and shared worlds, and that is now catching; Camelot Unchained, for example, is a Kickstarter MMO with a budget of $5 million and an unwavering focus on a niche audience that wants a hardcore PVP game. In some respects it's risky and uncompromising, but it seems wise to the lessons learned by its most recent peers, which is exciting.

Finally we come to MOBAs, a genre dominated by the enormous League of Legends, although there's space at the table for Valve's Dota 2 and perhaps Blizzard All-Stars as well.

All of these goings-on don't fall on deaf ears. It's not like ArenaNet or Blizzard work in a bunker, oblivious to current affairs. Blizzard is taking Titan back to the the drawing board, for example, which can be read as an admission that its current ideas are not up to scratch. Meanwhile, at ArenaNet, hundreds of staff play all the popular games of today, and they're not shy about being influenced by them.

"We draw inspiration from what other companies are doing and some of the other things that we're playing," Zadorojny freely admits. "Drastically, you wouldn't see 'Guild Wars 2 is now a MOBA', but you might see that maybe we introduce a new activity type or something like that, that plays similar to those types of things.

"We want to change up. We want to make things that are new and exciting for the players and give them a chance to try some of these things but are familiar with their character type and being able to celebrate that."

Traditional MMOs - big, hulking projects hoping to claw back investment with massive sales or micro-transactions or subscription fees - may be going the way of the dodo, then, but the fundamentals of the MMO concept are not, even if they are changing shape in order to retain their relevance and refresh their mystique.

Former Blizzard developer Mark Kern blogged recently about how he thought World of Warcraft, a game he helped build, had "killed" a genre. "Sometimes I look at WOW and think 'what have we done?'" he wrote. "I think I know. I think we killed a genre."

You can understand Kern's reaction, of course, because the last decade is littered with the remnants of dead and dying MMOs hewn in World of Warcraft's shape. But he's probably being a little harsh on himself, because it's not his fault that many publishers failed to look sufficiently beyond what WOW was offering in search of something more relevant to evolving tastes. And the fact is, as we saw during E3, many game makers are doing that now, and the fruits of those endeavours have almost finished ripening.

Of course, none of those games are called MMOs.

Perhaps Kern's right to a certain extent, then - World of Warcraft did kill a genre. But only in name.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

and you never out-level a zone since the dynamic events scale to players.

Screw that guy

 

[circ]

No shit.

 

[Indranys]

"I think we killed a genre."

MMO.

And nothing of value was lost.

 

[Grunker]

HHR beat me to it

and you never out-level a zone since the dynamic events scale to players.

Screw that guy

 

[Destroid]

Eve still going strong. Even though MMOs are not my preference, Eve retains a lot of what makes it an interesting style of game.

 

[Infinitron]

HHR beat me to it

and you never out-level a zone since the dynamic events scale to players.

Screw that guy

Mmm I'm not sure the "level scaling is evil" mantra holds for MMOs

 

[Delterius]

Wish I still played WoW, I'd probably be able to find butthurt somewhere. Though, by now, I think this is the consensus. There are still a lot of things in WoW, the so called endgame, where only a few people truly excel and even challenge global consensus on classes and builds; But the other 95% of the gameworld is a plastic theme park.

HHR beat me to it

and you never out-level a zone since the dynamic events scale to players.

Screw that guy

Mmm I'm not sure the "level scaling is evil" mantra holds for MMOs

Not as much as you'd think because, you guessed it, WoW linearized the traditional sandbox experience. But there's something else that happened as the gameworld grew and the focus shifted towards the endgame: the leveling experience was scaled back in difficulty circa BC.

Ironically, the game's longevity kept Blizzard from demanding player parties in a MMO. And paradoxically, the increased popularity (and the subsequent shift towards younger, less 'mature' and older more 'casual' generations) diminished the social aspect: you no longer need to interact with the gameworld in order to reach your objectives, much build large guilds to tackle the greatest challenges.

 

[Mangoose]

All you need is Eve Online with better gameplay on the basic level.

 

[Night Goat]

Mark Kern: "I killed MMOs, so buy my new MMO!"

I think he gives himself too much credit. WoW didn't kill MMOs, but it did stunt their progress for a few years, as everyone just cloned WoW to try for a piece of that pie. Now that developers are starting to innovate again, I think we could see a renaissance in the genre. On the other hand, MMOs take a lot of money to create, and anything that costs a lot of money will be dumbed down for the mongoloid hordes. I guess we shall see.

Mmm I'm not sure the "level scaling is evil" mantra holds for MMOs

I daresay that level scaling isn't necessarily evil, even in single-player games. The problem with games like Oblivion is that there's no reason to gain levels, because the enemies will always be the same level as the player. In GW2, the enemy levels don't scale - only the players' do, and they only scale downwards. The result is that you can't expect to survive in areas you're underleveled for, but you can go to areas you're slightly overleveled for and not have it be a complete waste of time.

 

[Machocruz]

Standard MMO is too safe, too structured. I didn't play Ultima Online, but what I've read makes it seem like the Wild West, a living, chaotic world. EVE is the only 'frontier' MMO left it seems.

 

[markec]

MMORPGs are dying not because WoW killed the genre but because almost all of them are shit.

 

[thesoup]

and you never out-level a zone since the dynamic events scale to players.

Fuck that loser.

Fixed.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Standard MMO is too safe, too structured. I didn't play Ultima Online, but what I've read makes it seem like the Wild West, a living, chaotic world. EVE is the only 'frontier' MMO left it seems.

I did play UO and I can safely say good riddance. A theme park is infinitely preferable to an Old Boys' Club.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

What exactly is the definition of a theme park MMO and what are its main characteristics?

 

[Cool name]

A theme park MMOs is basically every MMO out there today. They are 'driven' experiences where you have a clear path to follow from start to finish. Instead of, say, fighting over territory in Realm vs Realm PvP or whatever you do badly written quests in a linear fashion. Everyone who did came before you had the same experience as you do. Everyone who will come after you will have the same experience you did leaving aside expansions and such. There is no emergent gameplay, there is no a world with which you interact to shape (through socialization, guilds, territory control, Realm vs Realm, etc). A very controlled, safe, friendly enviroment with emphasis on PvE and 'casual' gameplay. I.E: You do log an hour a day, play for a while, then leave. There is no commitment and there is little pressure, and most of the gameplay is following the path the designers made for you and grinding for stuffies.

Is the very opposite is the 'other' kind of experience which is guided mostly by player interaction and game mechanics instead of 'plot.' You do explore, you do PvP, you make your own way through the game without guidance nor hand holding. My favorite element of those games I did play was Realm vs Realm and Guild vs Guild territory control PvP. That shit was just crazy. The stories grew out by themselves by the interaction of players, guilds, and realms. You make friends not because 'the grind becomes boring without chat' but because that time you were soloing two players of an opposite faction in your pure healer in a Realm vs Realm and some random dude came out of nowhere and saved your ass, so for that battle you became his healbot and began grouping together from then on. Or you and your party ambushed a high level Elite player of an opposite faction who was alone and she did kick your party's ass all by herself so you kind of become obsessed with defeating HER AND ONLY HER in a 1on1 duel and you start looking for her in battles to learn how she plays, how is she build, what mistakes she did make. Or several guilds, let's say A B and C, team up to conquer a territory from an enemy realm but one of those guilds, let's say A, has a secret alliance with a guild of the opposite realm, let's say D, who is 'enemy' of the guild that does control that territory, let's say E, so A retreats halfway through the battle with E so that B and C start getting wore down while still winning, then D attacks B holdings by surprise. B has to leave in a hurry to protect it's own territory, A waits a little bit so that C is wore down and then rejoins the battle against E so that they can be sure to take the territory for itself instead of having to share with B and C, and E did manage to weaken D as well and maybe conquer B territory for itself. Or you are in a small guild who somehow manages to capture a small out of the way territory but now must start playing the politic and alliance game to ensure you will have allies to help you when big guilds of another realm come to you because your holdings seem to be 'easy pickings,' but some of the guilds in your own side actually want you to lose the holding so that they can then go and conquer it themselves so it is all backstabby and sneaky and very dirty. That kind of stuff can't be compared to a 'theme park' experience. Is just people being people within the context and rules of the world they are in, which means it always develops into a very Romance of the Three Kingdoms type of situation.

 

[Mastermind]

http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/7540/Mark-Kern-Have-MMOs-Become-Too-Easy.html

In our own game, Firefall

If it had started with this I would have ignored the entire article. Well played.

 

[laclongquan]

Butthurts must be galore in such cases.

 

[Destroid]

Agassi DaoC?

 

[baturinsky]

It's "easy" to make great MMO.

1. Provide a "sense of achievement" to a very wide auditory for a very long time, without dumbing it down to "kill rat-gain level".
2. Make lore and story that is conveyed by gameplay, and not by wall of text.

 

[e-mailio estevez]

The article does make very good points. No MMO that I've played since DAoC has ever fostered the same sense of community. I think it's largely because in DAoC nothing was ever handed to you, you had to rely on your fellow realmmates cooperation to get anything done and the game didn't pull any punches.

The best gear was made by other players (at least pre-TOA). Hitting level cap was an accomplishment that could take months and few classes could ever grind as effectively as a full group could. There were no instances, no queues and very little hand-holding to speak of. Dragons could wipe the floor with an entire realm and not every server had even managed to kill one. And so on.

It's hard to disagree that modern MMOs seem to be more about min/maxing talent trees and filling your inventory with purples than the sense of discovery, challenge and large-scale emergent gameplay that ye olde MMOs used to offer. The guy's right in that regard. Every genre of games out there has seen its share of decline, though, so if WoW hadn't ushered it in it could've just as easily been something else.

 

[Norfleet]

I did play UO and I can safely say good riddance. A theme park is infinitely preferable to an Old Boys' Club.

I can agree with Vaarna's distaste for an "Old Boys Club", but I also am not a fan of recycled pabulum stuck on rails. Games like that are only truly interesting when you're breaking them. Hell, games, period, are only interesting when you're breaking them.

 

[Gurkog]

Agassi DaoC?

That kind of stuff happened to me quite regularly in DAoC. Good times! That game was so awesome for the first few years, but I doubt anything will be like it again.

 

[Zep Zepo]

Did early UO even have quests? I don't remember any. It was pretty much a player run world and economy.

I had the most fun during the BETA..char wipe..Guild would chop chop chop trees, craft craft craft axes...sell axes..guild buy boat, sail to New Magincia (No Moongate to there in the early days as I recall)...Claim it as our own and kill anyone who thought otherwise.

UO was pretty hardcore in the early days until whoever came along and pussified it.

Zep--