Last week, I talked a bit about power creep. But buried in there was something that you could easily miss as a guideline for this week’s column, in no small part because I didn’t plan for it to be this week’s column; it just worked out that way. Namely, I pointed out that a lot of the time what people see as power creep with early content is actually an entirely different problem, and it’s not a matter of power creep but of intentionally ruining a game’s balance.
World of Warcraft, actually, is a prime example of this. The game’s early game experience is staggeringly easy and fast, seemingly petrified of the idea that you might actually ever face any challenge in zones that are not the current expansion zones (and even then that’s debatable). It’s easy to look at that and assume it’s the result of power creep over the years, but you know that’s not the case. Why? Because all of this content, especially the starting area, has specifically been balanced and updated recently. This isn’t power creep. It’s meant to play like this.
Why is that? Well, let’s talk about gacha games.
Gacha games are designed to work around predatory monetization. You know this, I know this, it isn’t up for debate. There are things that can work based on gacha-esque mechanics which could theoretically be interesting as a gameplay feature, but the fundamental model is predatory. This is why I think a lot of people who know of this but haven’t played these games will sometimes be blown away when a new gacha game is both incredibly easy at the start and just throws resources at the player right away.
It isn’t new, of course. The gacha game I personally played for the longest (Granblue Fantasy, which has its charm) does, in fact, throw tons of stuff at the player right out of the gate. It gives you plenty to make you feel like you’re being welcomed into the game and you should go ahead and use those resources. Spend those crystals on a draw! It’s smart! Go ahead and use those resources!
You might think that the idea here is to slowly remove the reward and then make you work harder for it, and yes, that’s part of it. But there’s actually something more insidious going on here, and it’s about making sure you don’t leave.
See, flooding you with rewards and resources definitely ties into later slowing the pace and hoping you’ll pay in to get back the high. But that works only if you first reach a point of being committed. If you get flooded with resources and immediately use those to get The Character You Want, and then you need to spend money but you find you’re not having fun, well, you’re not going to spend money. You’re going to go do something else.
The goal here isn’t to bait and switch; it’s to get you invested and then hit you with the switch. And that means figuring out what is most consistently going to make people stick around, which ties into accomplishment. It’s hard to make something that everyone is going to find fun, but most people find “I did X cool things in this game” to be more engaging than doing fewer cool things. Thus, the games front-load some cool stuff.
And suddenly you wind up with new player experiences that are scared of new players because they have accidentally ruined the new experience.
I’m picking on WoW just a bit here because I am already a player; it does not need to convince me to play. I already know the game well enough, and I am not really the market for a new challenging experience. But the new player experience also isn’t really meant for me. No matter what the devs make, it’s probably going to be pretty easy because I know what I’m doing. But actual new players are going to find it oddly toothless and wind up just going through the motions until they decide to step out.
That’s not conceptual, either. That’s what literally happened the last time I helped guide a friend through the new player experience, and she was absolutely bored out of her skull. She wanted to give it a shot, but she found it so mind-numbingly easy that she had no desire to keep playing.
Human beings can, in fact, tell when we are being pandered to. Doing cool things in a game feels way less fun when there is no actual way to fail at something. The early missions in Warframe are a damn sight easier than later ones, but even on the first mission it is very easy to let the enemies shred right through your shields and then perforate your Warframe with automatic weapon fire. You can lose. That means that when you succeed, you know it wasn’t an epic win, but you know you did earn it.
Now, let me be clear, difficulty is a really hard thing to balance at the best of times. There’s a point of “too easy” and a point of “too hard” that is pretty easy to hit, but there’s a lot of space in the middle where some players are going to find something really simple and straightforward and others are going to have a hard time. I’m not trying to claim that every easy starter experience is the result of designers who aren’t trying.
Rather, my point is that there are a lot of starter experiences where the focus is very clearly on making sure that nobody bounces off because the early game is just too hard. And the result is basically universally to make a worse experience for players, because… what else would you expect from this particular process? If your first priority is making sure that nobody can fail, you also make sure nobody can succeed.
Challenge is a big, thorny issue that needs to be handled with a delicate hand, and it’s easy to feel like when you go back to the early game of a title you know very well that the game has gotten significantly easier. After all, you know how to play the game a lot better now, and with an online game a whole lot of things have doubtlessly changed over the years.
But often there is a very real problem wherein the designers have been pressured by outside forces to make sure the early game cannot be failed. It has been adjusted so that you can’t possibly bounce off the challenge to help you keep your interest. And that just shifts to the opposite extreme wherein you can’t engage because it’s too easy, your presence is basically irrelevant.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for this, and it’s hard to even be sure how many people actually do bounce off games because the early game is too easy compared to how many bounce off because it’s too hard. But it is a consistent phenomenon that is worth observing, and even if it doesn’t have just one solution it’s worth keeping in mind. You might feel stronger not because of power creep but because the developers are now willing to assure you that you are a very special boy the moment you stop standing in the fire.
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.
