Why am I here?
A lot of times I will slow-roll my column and lead to something unexpected, something that I am sure you are all used to at this point since I have had a weekly editorial column on the site now for five years now. (I don’t actually remember the negotiation between Bree and me when I started it up, but it was not a fight. It’s kept going regardless.) But this time I’m just putting my cards out on the table right from the start. The biggest question that every MMO has to answer is why you are here.
Keep in mind that I don’t mean this in a deeply metaphorical sense or anything. It is, in fact, a very standard and comprehensible situation. You need to not just answer but pre-emptively answer player questions about why they’re logging in and playing your game on a daily basis. It’s that simple. It’s that easy and that hard, all at the same time. Let’s talk about why.
Something I’ve touched on many times is that the point of a video game is to have fun. At the end of the day, that’s why you have something in the medium. You can have video games meant to do other things as well as have fun; educational video games, for example, aim to let you have fun and learn to speak French or learn geography or understand politics or whatever. But those are additional purposes. It’s a game (a fun thing) that also teaches you something, otherwise you’d get more out of just going to classes.
Frequently, people will note that video games are supposed to make money, but… that’s honestly secondary, and that’s not the reason they often slow things down or make you work for something. Like, play You Have To Burn The Rope and see if you feel satisfied. Games are, at their heart, tricking you into feeling you’ve accomplished something with challenges you were always meant to overcome. That’s the point.
The reason I bring this up is that there are absolutely game systems that are stretched out to unreasonable length, made harder with paywalls you can bypass, or otherwise turned into things that help drive revenue… but at the core, the problems these systems have is the same one I already alluded to. They’re not fun. They make you ask that main question again.
Why am I here?
No two people are necessarily going to have the same answer to that question for a given game. Your reasons for playing The Elder Scrolls Online could be many. Maybe you really like the game’s combat, or crafting, or daily quests, or area design. You could really enjoy the story, or the setting, or the atmosphere or the lore. A lot of your friends play. All of these are valid answers.
For most games – and especially MMORPGs – the trick is that you shouldn’t have one answer. As soon as you have one answer, it becomes really easy to throw that answer in the trash.
Let me use a non-MMORPG example. Final Fantasy XVI is a good game and I really enjoy it, but the game is very much laser-focused on a very narrow experience. It is a game in which you experience a rich, well-told story, learn about a detailed world, and take part in active and engaging combat. These are the things that the game does. There is no crafting, limited exploration, and so forth. And this becomes a major problem when you start exploring the game’s second continent, Ash.
No major spoilers here: By the time you explore Ash, you’ve done a lot of damage – but even more importantly, the residents of the continent are no longer available for interaction. Suddenly you run into an extended period of the game when the combat starts breaking down into a very repetitive cadence, you aren’t really getting upgrades or major changes, and you have an ability built that you are using pretty reliably. That means that the combat has gotten routine… and worse yet, the story is almost nonexistent simply because you’re just slogging through this hostile area. There’s just the occasional bit of dialogue in which Clive re-asserts what we already know he’s doing.
The sequence caps off with a decent boss fight, and the game manages to get some hype back for its last stretch (helped by getting one last Eikon before the next dungeon, then having a bunch of story-rich sidequests), but this section is rough because the stuff that has been keeping you in the game is suddenly weakened. Which leaves you asking… well, what am I doing? Why am I here? Is this what the rest of the game is going to feel like?
MMORPGs are slower games for a number of reasons, but one of those reasons is that at least theoretically these are games that give you a reason to team up. They’re meant to be social experiences as well as gaming experiences. But they can’t just keep you there because your friends are there; that would just mean that you all leave at the same time. They need to be fun games and fun group exercises.
And above all else, they have to explain why you’re there and why you’re playing. If you don’t have a reason that’s keeping you there, then as soon as you start losing momentum, you’re going to ask why you’re bothering. And the moment you ask that… well, you might find the answer is that you don’t have a reason for playing. It’s like old Looney Tunes shorts where you keep running on open air until you look down, but then you look down and the realization hits that this is going to hurt.
This is why it’s so important for the developers to have an answer and for the players to have an answer, to boot. It becomes all too easy to no longer have a reason, and the moment that happens, you stop wanting to log in at all. That’s how games collapse. And at the end of the day, that’s the question that really leads to shutdowns, when a lot of people ask “why am I bothering” and a lot of them – maybe even most of them – can’t actually come up with a compelling answer.
And it’s also why it’s important for a MMORPGs – games you play for years instead of just a month or so – to have more than just one answer. That’s what enables you to keep finding answers to the question that don’t fade away periodically. It’s what makes the difference between finding one patch less compelling and still playing anyway because of other things you’re doing… or hitting a bad patch and just shrugging and moving on.
There are a lot of answers for the question of why you’re here, some of them better than others. But the game needs to give you those answers. You have to want to keep playing it. And if a game can’t give you a good answer beyond momentum… that’s the sign of a game that isn’t built to last. Even if the answers the game gives aren’t ones that matter to you, if you can’t see who they would appeal to… that’s a sign.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
