by Jeff Woleslagle on Oct 12, 2009
Loading... is the premier daily MMORPG news, coverage, and
commentary newsletter, only from Ten Ton Hammer.
In the beginning, MMORPGs were social experiences. Then came
the idea of "playing alone together" and group support took a back seat
to a polished solo experience in many MMOs. Continuing last week's
thoughts on the renaissance of grouped play in MMOs, today's column
calls not for a return to clueless PUGs and lengthy grouped sessions
where nothing gets done, but for a new wave of group support tools that
make low- and mid-level grouping fun and worthwhile again. It's all in
Loading... The Win Condition.
You vote with what you view at Ten Ton Hammer, and the
result is the Ten Ton Pulse (
href="http://www.gunnars.com/" target="_blank">What
is The Pulse?).
Here's today's top 5 Pulse results: href="http://www.gunnars.com/">
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/41"Biggest movers this week:
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/117">StarImportant
Dates
Maybe you've
had this conversation. I was trying to explain MMORPGs to an older
relative over the weekend, and we just couldn't get past this question:
"How do you win? How do you know who won?" You don't have to be
someone's grandma to think that the win condition is probably the most
indispensable in all of games design. Why compete or adventure at all
without a big overarching goal in mind? Single player games, however
sandboxey, always have a point at which you're the winner or loser. But
MMOs are alone in intentionally never allowing you to win once and for
all.
That doesn't stop MMO players from trying to win.
Every WoW content patch and expansion brings another wave of
malcontents that somehow, against all prior evidence, thought that
their hard-won gear would remain the best forever. Epics are
made to be broken, however, and all that the endgame rushers do is suck
the joy out of the level-up game. There's little permanent distinction
available for any but the most hardcore raiders, who are the only ones
who have a shot at server and world firsts.
So why play a game we can never really win? Are MMO fans just a bunch
of masochists piloting the Kobayashi Maru? No, MMOs offer a more mature
premise that appeals to a more mature gamer, because just as in real
life, winning is a fleeting and largely subjective thing. The winner of
American Idol is a has-been in three years' time. No one but Steelers
fans care who won last year's Vince Lombardi trophy. UEFA teams go from
winners to losers on the trade of a single player. Multiplayer game
matches might have a winner this time around, but if you want to climb
the leaderboards you're in for an impossible grind.
This ties into today's epic thread and Martuk's article on five
indispensible social mechanics, but I'd like to see MMOs get back to
the days of the private win. You know, when it was a successful night
when someone finally retrieved their corpse from Lower Guk or someone
got one single component they needed for a quest.
Or when things went unspeakably bad, so bad that they're the stuff of
stories five and ten years later. The overarching goal, grandma, was to
get together with some friends, tool around, and have fun, just like in
the pen and paper days. And if you've stepped off the achievement
treadmill long enough to enjoy this kind of gameplay, you know that it
beats the instant and fast-fading thrill you get from a puple drop.
While soloing has gotten a ton of attention in every game since WoW,
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/75400">Martuk's
article on five indispensible social mechanics shows that
little to nothing has changed in terms of group support. Instead of
improving grouped play, devs have opted to make it obsolete (in favor
of soloing) for all but the endgame. This kind of approach, in my
opinion, threw out the baby with the bathwater. The solo MMORPG came
about because of inattention to the needs and wants of co-op gamers,
rather than a driving popular desire. Playing along together is just
wasting bandwidth, and doesn't nearly tap into the kind of experiences
MMOs are capable of.
There's two things that people hate about groups: 1) the time it takes
to form a group and get something accomplished, and 2) poor quality
PUGs where no one knows what they're doing. We can work with these
problems by providing: mechanics that auto-assign roles and teach us
how to excel at them early in the game (with dramatic xp bonuses for
playing your role well); more teleportation and group-summon abilities;
better interfaces, visuals, and audio that tell us who is doing what
and who is getting hit; more short term group goals; more synergy
bonuses; and so on.
If MMOs did a better job with supporting grouped play, I think we'd see
the kind of renaissance Machail (and a number of you) were pleading for
last week. Think so too? Disagree? Have your
say in the
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=47056">Loading...
forums.
Hottest Content:
style="font-weight: bold;">Aion Editorial: Adds- Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle and the Ten Ton Hammer
team