Your Job is to Make Tasty Sandwiches!

I walked into a Subway sandwich store for the first time earlier today. After ordering, I was confronted by a lot of options that weren’t presented in an efficient way. There were approximately four steps where I had to make some choice as to what to put on my sandwich—four distinct phases where different ingredients were either added or withheld from the sandwich.

When the sandwich was completed, it has a total of 4 ingredients in it (bread included).

I ordered a sandwich that had a distinctive name that suggested almost every ingredient that would be present. “Sweet onion chicken teriyaki” leads me to expect the sandwich has onions, teriyaki sauce, and chicken on it, probably with lettuce thrown in because that’s how sandwiches are usually made. Instead, after ordering the sandwich, I was confronted with four different decisions, each with more than four options. It was not clear at all what would go on this sandwich or what should. Why is that? Because I am not a professional chef. I don’t go into the store expecting to be saddled with making myself a good sandwich. I went to the store so that I could buy a good sandwich that they had thoughtfully designed and put together.

This is a great metaphor for a significant problem application designers face: giving the user as few decisions as possible while allowing them to effectively and easily use the application to accomplish their goals. Subway failed at this basic design problem by saddling me with far too many choices, almost invalidating its primary reason for existing (to sell me tasty sandwiches as easily and quickly as possible so as to make a profit).

Aion makes an innocent but devastating mistake in an effort to simply make a tasty sandwich. They’ve streamlined their game into a candy-coated, artificially enhanced stream of purpose-built monotony. Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition falls into this trap as well.

When you log into Aion, you enter a world that is clearly made so that you can run around and effectively kill monsters. Everything’s arranged nicely for your viewing and killing pleasure. The ducks are lined up and a well-maintained rifle is put in your hand for an enjoyable afternoon of shooting—but the ducks are wooden and the rifle doesn’t shoot anything, a wooden duck flips backwards whenever you fire. The gameplay is directed; it’s so directed that, after 10 hours, it felt completely empty to me. My path through the game was perfectly clear. It was so well lit and nicely paved that I felt that I might try a different, dustier, less-traveled path. But there was no other path.

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition (4e from here on) streamlined the hell out of the tabletop roleplaying—or, perhaps more aptly, rollplaying—experience. Its predecessor, 3.5e, was asymmetric, arcane, and had a serious case of power creep. Wizards of the Coast apparently had enough of that and decided to finely tune the 4e rules to cut off all those rough edges and remove the arcane and less-trodden paths, to simplify the complex, and to run out of town all the rules but those that governed situations that could be vaguely described as combat. Suddenly the sprawling 3.5e is replaced by a very consistent, smooth 4e that has all the corners neatly rounded and all the danger areas surround in safety fences. 4e is a game system that is very obviously a game—it has clear boundaries that become quite obvious when you try to run a 4e campaign. All those fun utility items that abounded in 3.5e are gone. The unique and flavorful mechanics of each class are replaced by abilities that are minimal variations on a consistent framework. The abilities and, by extension, the classes, feel like repackaged and rebranded copies of the same few ideas.

Streamlining games can solve mechanics problems, but it ultimately rips the soul out of a game. When all of the interesting detail is stripped and all the excitement is paved over, it doesn’t matter if the game is perfectly balanced: it simply will not have enough flavor to be fun. You might leave the game feeling like it was well-balanced and complete, but you won’t find yourself excited.

Terrible Idea: “It gets good at level 25!”

(It’s time to liven up this blog with some invective. As I read around the blogosphere, I’m often struck by the sheer idiocy of some of the sentiments expressed. The “Terrible Idea” articles will be a series of brief pieces where I yell at people who I think are representing opinions deleterious to the spirit of the MMORPG revolution. Beware that my expressions will be strong.)

My leisure time is valuable to me. If you’re going to give me a game and tell me that I have to play it for thirty hours before I have an honest shot at having some fun, I have better ways to spend my time.

Bootae has it right in this paragraph from his Aion review.

There are 2 key areas that an MMO developer needs to get right. Those being both the starting and end game experience. Your first hours in a new MMO need to grab you by the short and curlies, make you love the experience and drive you forwards towards the level cap. It needs to be good enough that we ignore any mid level grind, our subs happily staying active all the way until end game. (Bootae)

If I don’t see redeeming qualities within the first two to ten hours of gameplay, I’m shelving your game—and probably shelving it for good. I don’t think this is unreasonable whatsoever. If a game doesn’t respect my time enough to give me some of its patented fun content at a relatively early phase, I am not going to respect that game back. I certainly won’t re-up a subscription for a game that doesn’t respect me as a gamer.

“How can you have a valid opinion of an MMO without reaching max level and playing end-game?”

If my opinion isn’t as valid as some crazy grind-happy weeaboo who has spent four hundred hours killing aroused mushrooms, I don’t have a problem with that. I’m not a professional journalist. My opinions are biased towards a certain set of playstyles that are made remarkably clear if you read even the last five posts on this blog. I don’t need to suffer through forty hours of crap to know that a game isn’t worth my time. If it’s not worth my time now and it isn’t worth my time after a few more hours, I have better games that i can play. Even if my opinion is not “objective”, it’s still valuable. I value my time highly and so should you—I don’t put up with this garbage and neither should you.

Massively Meditative Online Games

Longasc tells me that I don’t “get” Aion. If you examine my last post in isolation, it’s easy to shrug off my criticism of Aion as coming from someone who doesn’t understand the appeal of the game. My comments might appear to be similar to the kind of comments a sports-indifferent person would make towards a Madden game.

I do “get” Aion. And I “get” theme-park and grind-fest MMOs. I know what the appeal is and I have enjoyed the style of gameplay in the past. I’ve been playing DDO and genuinely enjoying the game—DDO typifies the theme-park style of play as well as any game. I’ve played and genuinely enjoyed first-generation MMOs that rely on grinds. I didn’t stop playing Aion because I didn’t understand the point of playing the game, I stopped playing because I don’t think it’s a fun game to play. If a game’s not fun, it’s not worth my time.

There are four reasons why people play games past where they’re having fun:

1. Completionism. Some players enjoy finishing games and achieving all there is to achieve, regardless of grinds, frustration, and a general lack of fun.
2. Meditation. When a game is sufficiently easy and grants a constant, pleasant stream of ego-ticklers, you can fall into a meditative state of relaxed play where you’re not having fun, but you are mechanically engaged in a way that allows your mind to rest. In the movie Layer Cake, one character tells another that he enjoys disassembling and reassembling his pistol without looking—he claims the mechanical activity allows his body to be occupied so that his mind can be freed. This is meditation.
3. It’s better to play a game that occupies you than to be bored otherwise. Some players play because otherwise they wouldn’t know what to do with their time—they’d be bored otherwise, so they chose to do something that at least will occupy their time. The minor social and mechanical rewards are enough of a prod that they don’t forget about the game, so they keep logging in.
4. It’s better to play a game with friends, even if it’s not fun, than to play any game alone. Social and casual players will play where their friends are because playing the game is secondary to sharing an experience with their friends.

Although, in the past, I’ve tried (and sometimes enjoyed briefly) playing games because of the first two reasons, I currently fit none of these descriptions. I don’t play games past the point at which they’ve stopped being fun. I get far less satisfaction from having finished a game than from enjoying the game’s content; I have other meditative hobbies (I play drums and write); I have other activities to occupy my time while not gaming and not working; I don’t tend to make friends that share my taste in games—I haven’t been able to find an MMO that has been enough fun to keep me around so long that I could find a guild with which to fall in love.

I play games to reach a flow state and have an enjoyable and memorable experience.

 

Most MMOs are at best in the “Control” section of this skill vs. challenge graph. In the “control” state, I have relatively high skill and the game is built for moderately-skilled players, so I can experiment with impunity and have some fun. Aion is in the “Relaxation” state for most of its players, but for me it sits firmly in the “Boredom” state. It’s not because I’m mediocre, but because the game doesn’t allow me to be much better than some arbitrary point that happens to fall within the boredom octant of my personal state graph.

I play games to get into the “Flow” state. When I started playing MMOs, I found it easy to get into the flow state because the challenge was high compared to my skill and knowledge of the games—I was innocent and the game worlds were full of magnificent mysteries that intrigued me. Now I see straight through every challenge presented in a typical play session of an MMO, so games like Aion have sunk from Flow or Arousal down to Boredom, Relaxation, and, ultimately, Apathy. If I don’t see myself having a chance at reaching the flow state in a game, I will not waste my time with it. There are always better games out there waiting to be found; there’s no reason to squander my time with mediocrity.

Aion: No.

After about 10 days of playing Aion for 2-4 hours a day, I’ve decided it’s a waste of time and money.

• The world feels claustrophobic. No sense of exploration whatsoever. The world doesn’t feel big, open, and full of interesting nuggets to discover. It feels small, and cramped.
• There is one leveling path. No fun for alts. I can’t go through the early levels the few times I need to see a few different classes’ capabilities. I’m not going through the mediocre starting content more than twice. After the first time I never wanted to see it again.
• Leveling is slow. Whether you’re grinding mobs or turning in quests that forced you to grind mobs, leveling starts to drag. I find myself not wanting to log on because I’ll just be grinding the same boring tasks yet again with no variation.
• The game is a combination of naked grinds. Grind quests. Grind mobs. Grind tradeskills. Nothing innovative or even particularly fun there. Unless, of course, your a masochistic EQ nostalgiac. In that case, I pity you. This world is nowhere near good enough to make mob grinding seem anything but a trivial treadmill of meaninglessness.
• Combat is boring in the early levels. This game expects me to fight thousands of monsters over the course of 30-40 hours without any real strategic thinking or skill needed. Awful. It might have a chance at not completely sucking if there was ANY significant character customization or gear selection prior to level 20.
• Crafting is always boring. Once you’ve got the mats, click a couple of times and you’re waiting for your work to finish. For hours. No thanks. This is doubly bad because you can use the “work order” system to completely trivialize leveling crafting. The designers literally are telling players that this is just a matter of spending 20 hours waiting for progress bars to fill.
• Character creation is all flash. You can customize your character’s looks to a very pleasing extent. Too bad you can’t actually customize your characters capabilities in the game at all. Aside from picking your class, you have zero character build decisions to make and maybe one or two gear decisions to make in the first 40 to 60 hours of gameplay.
• It’s clearly not made for this market. The world is so odd—and I’m not saying that in a positive way. It’s like Ryzom decided to take all of the character out its world, then spend a few orders of magnitude more on texturing. The interface is also quite strange at times; it’s like they tried their hardest to westernize the game, but no matter how hard they tried they couldn’t find a word for four-sided circle.
• Flight is a flighty novelty. Awesome! I can fly! WHEEE—oh wait, why am I hitting an invisible wall? Oh. I can’t fly in this zone. And I can’t fly in this one either. So, for no apparent reason I can’t fly in most of the zones I have access to? Great innovation, guys.

So after playing Aion for 20-30 hours, I’m done. We’ve seen this before. Novelty is seductive at first but turns out to be a nagging hag not worth the shoes she walked in on. I’m done with theme-park pay-to-play MMOs. I’ve yet to find one that is worth my money. I’m not going to spend my money in the future if the game isn’t obviously a significant departure worth supporting.

Remnants of an Age Past

What shall be named The Mistake, I started playing It again. I was trying to save myself like a Kama Sutra monk, waiting for the Aion release (double entendre definitely intended). The last flirtation involved gallivanting through Northrend, an unexpectedly fun experience (pre-Tournament Icecrown is my favorite zone in all of WoW).

But this time I am trekking through Azeroth, all the old content, and I have come to a realization. I must call it a revelation, lest I get so frustrated at the bait 'n switch that I end my adventure here and now. I have finally understood that "killing with purpose" motto pronounced several times by the WoW designers. It's like the missing link between EverQuest and Aion. Newer quests are not as crude as 1.x WoW quests as to reveal this dark secret. I feel like I've discovered Ida.

Prior to WoW, mobs were simply grinded for experience points. You or your party found a camp somewhere and just killed mobs for hours. WoW quests are a layer of story on top of this grinding. The quest gives you a "purpose" to go an kill 100 boars, but you are still camping somewhere and killing mobs for hours. This is prevalent throughout much of 1.x WoW:

• Recipe quests which ask you for several animal parts which would require you slaughter an entire field many times over.
• Enemy stronghold quests which make you kill an entire cave of humanoids only to get a follow up quest to go back into the same cave and kill the leader (after all the mobs have respawned).

The idea of grinding mobs doesn't really go away; now there is bonus experience for doing the "purpose" layer.

I'm putting purpose in quotes because Blizzard seems to think that players just killed willy-nilly without rhyme nor reason prior to the Deliverance. Those xp camps had purpose: get experience points. And as I've said before, I enter some twisted, meditative state when I'm just farming mobs for an extending period of time. I also like xp parties, something I'm looking forward to in Aion.

Since the Enlightenment, Blizzard has seemed to have forgotten how things were and are addressing the outcry of monotony originating from the mistake of calling these story purposes "quests". We have bombing runs, vehicle combat, and other mini-games focusing not on "killing with a purpose" but on "fun".

Maybe we can change how bonus experience is distributed.

In FFXI, when you killed mobs within a time window of each other, you received bonus experience. It wasn't something to sneeze at; you could get upwards of 50% extra experience. What if we changed the quest experience system to something resembling the bonus experience system? Instead of stocking up on "Kill 20 Monkeys" quests, let's reserve the title of Quest for actual quests. When players start killing mobs in a certain area, give them a heads up as to how to acquire the bonus experience. Ask them to kill 10 mobs in 5 minutes; or 50 Rats total. Once they complete the objective, give them the bonus experience.

Of course this is assuming we have the standard, target-hotbar MMORPG combat system. A few months ago, I had envisioned a high-intensity combat system--somewhat of a throwback to Action RPGs. Characters have large amounts of AOE attacks, designed to cut through hordes of enemies quickly. Think of Diablo II. But instead of giving experience points just for killing mobs, we make the players run Gauntlets. Think of Gauntlets like instanced dungeons, with start and end locations and checkpoints along the way. Players receive bonus experience when they reach checkpoints and ultimately the end.

Simple. Fun. Flashy. Not monotonous like "Kill 30 Vultures". There is even the potential to record times of parties as they race to the end: have a leader board for the Achievers.

This originally was part of a grand territory control system, but as a middle layer game, what do you think?

MMO Novelty and Social Networking

We are at a turning point in the MMO genre. It is a point which will bring about either the downfall or the pervasion of the grandest display of video games seen yet. Up to this point, I feel MMOs have survived entirely on the novelty of playing in a large, persistent world. Players were willing to do very un-game-like activities because that's just how it is in an MMO. By the time grinding catches up with them, they are bound to the world with social ties--guilds and friends they've played with over the months.

The novelty is wearing thin, particularly in the combat area. More and more MMOs are appearing to be copies of each other because developers can't get past those poorly designed grinds. Aion, Champions Online, Fallen Earth, SWTOR: all have the same combat system. And guess what? WoW pretty much popped the MMO cherries of any gamer who would begin to try an MMO. Please stop with the "tried and true" single-target, hotbar doldrums. If you stay down this path, then the only way gamers are going to migrate to your new world is if all his social ties move there, and you will lose that battle also.

I'm projecting my feelings for Aion, but I'm willing to bet other players feel the same way. Aion deviates little from the beaten path. The only way I will be paying for Aion is if several of my RL and gaming friends decide to play it.

The only feature I am looking forward to is grouping. Apparently you can kill monsters in groups as a means to get XP, which is reminiscent of EQ, FFXI, and all those aged MMORPGs. What I am afraid of is that this feature gets American-ized out, and the grossly optimal way to level is solo-play. Fewer players willing to group means fewer groups.

So should NCSoft remove my beloved parties, I will be very reluctant to start paying them. I'm not going to torture myself just to chat and play with my friends. If I'm that socially depraved, then I'll start using Facebook more.

And here's the kicker. With all the social networking outlets, with all the social apps and casual games found on all these sites, MMOs will become obsolete. That is, unless they offer something these venues cannot: engaging progression that can't fit inside a Facebook app. If players get the same rehashed game systems over and over, they will learn to stop trying new MMOs. Less players means less revenue, and for a world that requires millions of dollars to create and maintain, that is not a sustainable business model. MMOs will die out.