A friend and I were talking about an MMORPG’s content recently (it doesn’t matter which one) and I was pointing out how that particular style of content is a problem because it is uniquely terrible as repeated content. Her contention was that while that is true, does it have to be repeated? Couldn’t it just be something you do once and then never have to do ever again or even have a reason to do so again? And that inspired this whole column because she was genuinely asking, and the answer makes for a good discussion.
The reason that I say that it isn’t important which one or what was involved is because every MMORPG ever has a certain degree of this problem. Content of any kind takes money, time, and resources to develop, and that means it needs to be used for more than just a single jaunt, and that perforce is going to have to weigh on any sort of development evaluation. But that’s a basic idea that needs to be extrapolated on, so let’s talk about it.
Let’s start with a basic statement: All content in an MMORPG takes time and effort to develop. If you disagree with that assessment, well… it’s not an opinion. It’s a statement of fact. Even if you’re making a new zone that’s just The Big Pit In The Ground For Everyone To PvP In, you have to spend time making the map, setting PvP flags up, setting entrances and exits, and so forth. You will have to spend time making this.
That’s not to say that all of this requires an elaborate, bespoke effort from zero. If you are just making a big hole in the ground, you can probably make the map pretty quickly and pull pre-existing assets to make it work. You can cut a lot of corners if you’re developing smart. The point isn’t that everything takes an insane effort, just that everything takes a nonzero amount of effort, and you need to factor that into any discussion about MMO content.
So if a company is going to spend the time making this, the hope is that players will actually use it for something.
Have you ever gotten a younger relative a really cool toy and found that said relative just wants to play with the box it came in? You can’t be mad at the kid for it, but… come on. Boxes are cheap. The toy was more expensive. You want it to have been worth the time you spent buying it and the money you spent acquiring it. It’s a similar equation, except instead of the designers having a potentially wounded ego, they also have to justify why they spent X monies on developing something players don’t want to use.
You might also have wounded egos, too, but that’s a different discussion.
MMORPGs are a little different from most video games insofar as they are games built upon repetition. There are potential points of comparison found ages back, of course, with games like Rogue or most early arcade games built on repetition to some degree, but as games have matured, the general feel is that a game is supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end. Saints Row the Third is an amazing game, and you can spent a lot of time roaming around Steelport blowing things up after you’ve cleared the missions, but once you control the whole city, have cleared every mission, maxed out every level, and so forth…
You reach an endpoint. You’re done. But MMORPGs are built to make sure you are never quite done. And thus every piece of content needs to be built with some degree of repetition in mind, even if it isn’t something you necessarily have to do over and over again.
This doesn’t mean that the content in question has to be worse, mind you; it just means that the content is designed to be played. If you spend two hours diving in a dungeon in World of Warcraft, you expect to get something out of it in the end. Indeed, this was kind of a thing in the launch version of the game. The first time you lose an entire Saturday afternoon to faffing about in Wailing Caverns because nobody knows what’s going on and you’re trying to finish off two dozen quests and getting lost in endless loops, it’s a fun diversion. Everyone laughs and you have fun killing what seems like an endless set of druids and snakes. But that’s also not an experience you want to have every time you need to go in there.
It’s for precisely this reason that over time, the game has made dungeons more straightforward, made entering them less arduous, and generally just improved the process of getting in, slurping up the fun parts, and then getting out. And yeah, that does alter the first-time experience somewhat, but the cost of developing dungeons is too high for this content to really be designed to be one-and-done.
My point here is not that you cannot design content that takes two hours; rather, it’s that players are going to expect rewards commensurate with the time spent in that content. And sometimes that is… difficult, either because of the game’s reward structure or just because it’s hard to keep up that energy for a certain length of time. There’s a reason WoW gates and saves its raids: because these can be multi-hour affairs when done on-level, so it’s only fair to not force players to do the whole thing in one sitting.
But if you’re designing content that takes two hours, you’re also probably doing a lot of design work for that content. You are probably making a very large area for players to explore and building lots of unique stuff just for that content. If it’s just two hours of hitting something that can’t kill you and will just slowly die, you haven’t made MMORPG content; you’ve made Clicker Heroes. That means that you expect players to be actually doing this content, which means you need to put something at the other end to make it uniquely compelling and rewarding.
And it means that just from a development resource standpoint, some players certainly will do this content once and then never enter it again (because that’s how humans work), but you don’t want to make this hostile or pointless to repeat. This is hard to do for big, slow content, which can lead to things that are too resource-intensive to go without reuse and too poorly suited for rewards to make replaying the content even remotely appealing.
Yes, there was a time when you could get people to do regularly scheduled Dynamis runs in Final Fantasy XI, but even then people got exhausted by having to spend too much time slogging through content even for the rewards. Even if you were just there to bring Treasure Hunter while the rest of the party actually pulled stuff. (Actually, even more so.) Sometimes the reason content is not good isn’t because it’s not a cool experience, but because you don’t just do it once and then leave forever.
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.
