Balancing Challenge and Fun -
The Casual vs. Hardcore Debate

By Darkgolem

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It's an extensive debate: how hard and how long should a quest be in a massively-multiplayer online game (MMOG)?  There are, in general, two schools of thought about this.

One group of people feel that in order to fit gaming online around their lifestyle, they need to be able to play games for relatively short periods of time.  This makes sense. After all, gaming isn't just for people with large periods of free time--family, work and school can (and probably should) take top priority over quality gaming time.

And yet, MMOGs can take a lot of time to play, relative to most games. There's no saving in the middle of a quest or mission, because the rest of the people you are with are real people.  They don't freeze in place, ready to continue when you return, when it's time for you to go to bed or work on something else.

If the challenges you face are too difficult, that can extend the amount of time you need to defeat them. Even if an adventure takes a reasonable amount of time to run through without difficulty, having to re-enter an adventure a few times can make a half hour quest turn into an hour and a half marathon. Group cohesion can fail if something is too hard, people will leave to find something easier.  Then you need to look for other people to assist you in completing a quest.

There are gamers who want to be able to enjoy a long and extensive gaming session. The appeal of MMOGs is the immersion into the setting the player experiences. It takes time to direct your attention toward an online game, and it can be hard to enjoy a setting and genre when pulled out of the setting by short adventures. Defeating an opponent and his cronies is a lot less satisfying when it involves only 3 rooms and pulling a lever.  The challenge of a quest needs to pull your attention into the game, or you're not getting your moneys worth.

It's also less interesting when short adventures are the rule. There are a limited number of plotlines available that can be created for a MMOG with the resources of a game company and the limits of modern software. Within these restrictions, quests can be more interesting if long, simply because you have more variety you can put into these adventures.  If quests are going to be short, they are more likely to be of the “gather x of item y and bring them back to me”, or “kill x of y and report to me”.  A longer quest can be more compelling, and less repetitive.

It's understandable for people to want a very difficult challenge to be available, something that isn't humdrum or rote.  It gives a real sense of accomplishment, aside from simple experience points, to overcome this sort of challenge.

If playing a game is easy, then the interest in that game only lasts as long as the graphics and gameplay are new.  Considering the cost of modern games, that amount of entertainment for themoney is too pricey for most people, especially when you take into account the monthly cost of a MMOG. This is fine, but I feel that there should be some qualifications on challenges beyond those that are part of a normal quest.  The normal challenges of an adventure should be great enough that they are interesting but not so much that they make an adventure too long to complete within the time frame the developers plan.  A more difficult challenge should be clearly written as such in the description of the quest (when you pick it up), and the reward should be commensurately higher.

How to fit these the need for casual play experiences as well as longer, more challenging quests into a MMOG is difficult question.  There are ways to make the time spent online shorter without cutting into the time spent playing.  Some of these items I recognize in the design of Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO).  First and foremost, they have reduced travel time between quests by removing huge zones between the quest and the town you start in.  There is also the fact that quest content is instanced, meaning no need to wait to meet that particular creature you wanted to face up against.  Resting is done at shrines, as opposed to spending time sitting around slowly regenerating spell points and hit points.

There are “danger zones” within the game, at all levels, which allow one to face opponents without committing to a long term quest.  These danger zones can require up to 12 people, allowing higher difficulty challenges without detracting from the standard half hour quest.  Another way the developers address difficulty is challenge ratings.  They have set up challenge ratings for quests.  One could go into more difficult or less difficult challenges based upon how much time and difficulty you want (one assumes).

It appears that the DDO developers have decided that adventures should be about a half hour, on average, with shorter and longer quests being available, too. The belief the developers seem to express is that they want to accommodate that amount of time, minimum, while still having longer quests and quests that link to other quests in turn.

MMOGs can no longer have periods of over an hour between accomplishments.  You need to be able to go online, find a group to go with, and play enough to have an enjoyable experience and advance within an hour, or it's not going to be something that can be played by gamers these days.  People need to be able to play games, enjoy immersion into their games, and yet still be able to commit to their other interests and obligations.

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