All right, folks, pop quiz. I want you to name for me the first major raid in Ultima Online. That was the first game that was marketed as an MMORPG, it is indisputably an origin point for the genre as a whole, and thus it kind of has to be the place where raiding was initially put forth as the pinnacle activity of MMORPGs, right? Clearly, correctly, this is a game that introduced raiding, and while you might not know the game backwards and forwards, you must know about the game’s epic raids against foes from prior Ultima games like Mondain and Minax, right?
Those of you who actually know the game’s history right now are either laughing hysterically or screaming at your monitors right now because of course I made all of that up. Mondain and Minax are the villains of the first three games in the series, who make largely event- and lore-related appearances in the MMO. They are not raid fights meant to be the pinnacle of the game’s content; that sort of destination was really more of a later addition to the genre.
And that isn’t a problem. The reason I’m citing UO here isn’t because it was lacking something; it’s because there’s a more interesting question about why people think that big organized PvE fights against singular bosses are some kind of natural law.
RPGs, as a genre, love some character progression. Horizontal and vertical both. You start off weak and with few options, gain more options and more power, and eventually you reach a point wherein you can’t gain much more inherent power but you can get ever more powerful items. Sure, that +1 sword is neat, you guess, but this is a +5 sword of slaying. Makes that +1 sword seem like a real piece of crap by comparison.
And none of this is bad or some kind of problem inherently. You play the game, you get more stuff. In most single-player games, this is pretty straightforward. How do you get better weaponry in Elden Ring? You kill enemies, farm materials, and explore. What do you do with better weaponry? Kill enemies, farm materials, and explore. If you do not find fighting enemies in the game fun and do not like farming materials, then you are not going to be engaged in the game in the first place.
MMORPGs, though, are a bit different because they do not present the same singular line.
Some of this is dependent upon the game, yes; lots of games do provide at least a basic-level guidance for what you are supposed to be doing as you progress. But that guidance does not force you to engage with every aspect of the game in order to make progress. If you really hate crafting, all of the big MMORPGs on the market will let you completely ignore it.
But how much that crafting matters still varies wildly. You’re missing very little in World of Warcraft if you don’t engage in crafting, but you’re missing a fair bit in Guild Wars 2 without it, and you’re missing a huge chunk of content in Final Fantasy XIV. The amount of reward crafting gives you varies substantially. And the question that comes up then is which game is right? Which one is making crafting appropriately rewarding?
The answer to that question is all of them. And none of them. Because MMO content and the rewards from it are all made up. There are no rules about this. It can be whatever the designers want it to be, and it can be nothing, and you can’t really engage with it on any other level.
In WoW, the game has long had a structure wherein questing leads to dungeons and dungeons lead to raids, and raids are meant to be the pinnacle of the game. Everything else was meant to either support raiding or make it easier to get to raiding. This isn’t some secret insight; the people who were designing the game in large part were fans of raiding in EverQuest and designed the game to more effectively reach the stuff that they saw as the most fun part of the game. This isn’t subtext, it’s text, and it’s not some hidden fact that was never discussed.
By contrast, City of Heroes – which released in a similar timeframe – had raids, but it was not designed around them as a pinnacle of content. It was expected for the game to have this in it, but it was hardly the biggest element of the game, and indeed Hamidon was not the template for the game but more of an exception. Task forces (functionally, linked series of party-based missions) were what the game was based around. To this day, taking part in a daily clear of a couple quick Incarnate trials is probably the most time-efficient way to power up your build.
Which one is correct? Neither of them and both. If you really enjoy raiding, WoW’s approach is built to facilitate it, but if you don’t enjoy it, CoH is probably going to appeal to you more. But in both cases this isn’t some natural law.
“But the most rewarding content should be the most difficult content!” Sure, that’s a valid philosophy, but the reality is that difficulty is made up. I wasn’t just accidentally namedropping Elden Ring earlier; that game is considered rather difficult, and it is balanced around solo fights. The whole concept of the game’s mandatory PvP when you summon allies is that having allies makes fights easier.
For that matter, there are more kinds of difficulty to be tested in any given encounter. You could argue that crafting is far more difficult than any PvE encounter; after all, you don’t have to master a scripted fight, just take the time to farm and skill up and stockpile resources, sometimes at great personal cost. Or you could argue that every PvE fight is fundamentally easier than any given PvP fight, which always has an air of unpredictability. By that token, PvP should reward the best stuff and PvE should always be a tier below that.
And if you’re bristling at that, it’s fine, because the whole point is that it’s not really about the most difficult content and it never has been. It’s about something else.
I want you to do something. I want you to write down for yourself what you think are the three most fun activities to take part in within any MMO. Again, you don’t need to tell me, I’m not grading you or anything, just write down your three choices. Be honest about them.
Now, remember last week’s column? I asked you to write down what you think the three most rewarding activities should be, then I asked you to put that to one side and completely forget about it. And if you did that, I want you to pick that back up and look at it compared to the list you just wrote.
Is there overlap there? Maybe even upwards of 75% overlap? I’m willing to bet the answer is yes, because it always has been when I’ve done this experiment in person. But you don’t need to tell me about it because you can easily say that I’m completely full of it or that I’m completely right and I have no way of double-checking your answers anyway.
The point is just to give you something to think about. It’s not wrong to feel the things you enjoy most should be the most rewarding things to do in an MMORPG. It’s just important to own that as your reasoning.
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.
